Author must have not played SimCity 4 with custom lot mods which then those would contradict the article.
I myself have taken advantage of the diagonal painted 1x1 parking lots. When using the regular scale Maxis cars or Cycledog cars in those spaces, they are more realistic that the car doors actually have enough room to open up, whereas the chunkier pack of cars that came with the textures are just fatter cars. I was using SAM street parking before, but they complained pavement doesn't grow on trees, and those rely on 5 spaces jammed on a single tile instead of the wider 4 spaces. I only agree with the article by default creation. The default don't work, because they assumed access to the parking lots on all sides of the properties, but the game simply just don't work this way, so parking is blocked or non existent. Whereas modders have made it possible for serious amounts of space in SimCity 4 to be wasted by only parking lots for miles of city blocks. I don't mean the custom lots of real world stores and restaurants that do have parking, but other players were well aware of the parking situation, and released all sorts of custom parking lots. I just setup that sort of thing myself though, but I mean the MAPP amusement park pack has 4 separated parking lots, and all together, they take a serious amount of space. The only other option for players is the parking decks, which near by a Maxis default development, they seem to make perfect sense.
Cities Skylines to compare seems to even incorporate more on-road parking filled with several more cars, much more than SC4 don't even have by default or even with mods, as no matter what modified street mod I've had, only seems to have parallel parking every 2 spaces instead of every one, unless you use SAM. That however, along with parking decks, is something Cities Skylines just can not deliver at.
However, when it comes to SimCity 4, I have a lot of suburbs opposed to limited skyscraper cities, and of course I go for realism, so of course I reflect the space taken.