No it’s not, it hides the skip countdown, once skipping is an option, the button is there. The scrubber shows the length of the unskippable portion of the ad instead of the length of the full ad, so it’s a different kind of deception, but the button is still there when it’s usable.
This is pretty big news, I would think it would be relevant in way more than just one article, time to do some updating.