Comment by dymk

The person I'm responding to acknowledges that "is a" & "acts like a" are equivalent in the context of the article.

If somebody is getting hung up on something as nit-picky as that, they're not going to see the forest for the trees in an article like this.

Ironically, playing nit-picky semantics games like this is the kind of avoidant attitude that lead people astray from personal growth.