No, it is an article that includes a short in-article ad for Linear. It's the text equivalent of when a YouTube video thanks some company for sponsoring the video and spends 30 seconds saying some good things about them before resuming whatever the video is about.
This is good. This is the kind of advertising that people here usually say that sites should be using if they need ads.
When a video says "so check out NordVPN" before returning to gardening content, I don't have any concerns that the gardening content is influenced by the advertising - they're unrelated. This article is about software development and contains an ad which is irrelevant to everything but software development. That's completely different.
That's basically the same way magazine ads work. If the magazine focused on a particular category most of the ads would be focused on that category too.
For example "Chess Life" mostly contains ads that are irrelevant to everything other than chess. "QST", a ham radio magazine, mostly contains ads that are irrelevant outside of ham radio.
This is what I most often see people here suggesting as the right model for internet advertising.
OP here.
I actually feel that having ads that are relevant to the people reading are better both ways, as you might actually learn about a good tool :) (I try at least to only work with products I believe in).
I felt that having the ad between line dividers, and having this:
"Thanks Linear for supporting today’s article!"
This is good. This is the kind of advertising that people here usually say that sites should be using if they need ads.