I personally think the article still concluded that AA batteries suck. They suck because they present a "standard" interface that is utterly dependent on the specific battery chemistry. What people expect is that the device should support a large voltage and current range as input, but they don't.

The AA battery standard is nothing but compromises. Zinc-carbon sucks because the internal resistance is too high, making them a throwaway product that shouldn't be sold. Alkaline batteries are okay-ish, but they are not rechargeable.

NiMH has a lower voltage than Alkaline. Any sane person would have proposed a different standard than AA for the rechargeable case so that the devices can be built to support the lower voltage out of the box. Meanwhile lithium AA batteries "suck" because lithium based batteries are too good (3.6 V) in comparison to their Alkaline and NiMH counterparts.

To maintain the facade of the AA standard, the lithium AA batteries must have an internal DC converter. You might now ask what the problem with a DC converter is, after all, it seems to work just fine. The AA standard is based around the idea that the voltage across the battery is always on. There is no concept of a turned off battery. This means the DC converter is always on and actively discharging the lithium battery. If the lithium AA battery is of low quality, it may not shut off and deeply discharge itself or prevent further recharging. If the lithium AA battery is of high quality, you can probably (wishful thinking) recharge it, as long as the charger comes from the same vendor. The charger turns on at higher voltages (3.7 V to 5 V), which is how the lithium AA battery detects that it needs to switch to the charging mode. When you see some ridiculous advertising like 3200mWh, always consider that this might be equivalent to some much smaller capacity NiMH/Alkaline battery, due to the permanent self discharge.