Agreed. Matt Levine is one of the few commentators that fully understands market microstructure. The Bloomberg View linked in a different comment (by John Arnold) is horrible with terminology, though.
Scare quotes are also bad composition. Since the author is the author, the author should word concepts correctly and take full responsibility for word choice.
Not only that, scare quotes are often used precisely to misrepresent an idea and then avoid responsibility for it, which seems like a pretty dishonest rhetorical strategy to me.
He's technically "not lying," but many people won't notice the footnote nor appreciate the difference. All they will hear is "front-running == should be illegal"