Why would you use a classical model to describe a quantum system? That's the kind of wordplay that those articles do, and almost identical to my example about materials. It's entertaining, but meaningless.
Well in this case you absolutely can, the results just seem counter to our intuition about temperature. Negative temperature is a meaningful description of these types of systems.
I'm trying to explain how articles often conflate "intuition" with "breaking physics", and you're making your argument by conflating them. We're having different conversations.