Sure it's a spectrum and the exact edges can be blurry. But no-one's going to argue that there isn't a qualitative difference between a sql query and the same logic written out in c
And I’m not arguing that. The article is dealing with those blurry edges, though, and what layer “matters” in evaluating the distinction is very much at issue. So if we’re going to compare to SQL/C, we need to bring in the relevant analogous nuances