No, their revised understanding is more accurate. The model has internal representations of concepts; the seahorse emoji fails because it uses those representations and stumbles: https://vgel.me/posts/seahorse/
Word2vec can/could also do the seahorse thing. It at least seems like there's more to what humans consider a concept than a direction in a vector space model (but maybe not).
https://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2021/07/word2vec-for-wo...