It has nothing to do with how "correct" that article is. The question is whether or not it's relevant to the discussion regarding the alteration of sports cards.
If you apply your same logic more broadly, then you'll end up having to demand that all collectors wear white gloves at all times while handling their cards because to do otherwise would result in card "alterations". Thus, making them "fraudsters" if they fail to disclose having touched their cards with their bare hands when selling.
Don't believe me? Here, check out this article from Goucher College on how to handle paper artifacts and how the oils from your skin damage paper fibers (much more so than water, I should add). [I can point to articles written by experts too!]
https://faculty.goucher.edu/eng330/b..._old_books.htm
Here's an excerpt:
But why stop there?
If water "alters" cards, then all sellers from humid climates must include a disclosure in all of their listings unless they want to be guilty of committing "fraud" by your absurd definition.
Surely, you are aware that storing paper in plastics can deteriorate (alter) the paper as well, right? Plastics outgas over time, causing damage to the paper fibers, breaking them down and causing them to deteriorate. A quick search with Google AI yields the following:
The reality is that the oils from our hands and the plastics we store our cards in (especially those older 9-pocket pages/binders and top-loaders) are far more harmful and damaging to our vintage cards than water is. Literally everything we do with our cards "alters" them in some way if applying your standards for the definition of what it means for something to be "altered".
If you want to have a discussion about card alterations, then you have to establish a useful definition of what it means for a card to be "altered" in the first place. And that definition has to be within the context of the hobby and how something affects its value, not in some quantum physics context regarding the entanglement of atoms or some other random bullshit definition that doesn't apply (you're good at those). Also, that definition has to be applied consistently and must hold up to scrutiny. Otherwise, it's useless and gets us nowhere. For example, you can't say it's not an alteration to remove wax from the back of a 1986 Fleer basketball card but it is if you remove wax from a 1972 Topps baseball card. And you can't say that it's OK to soak a 1948 Leaf card in water to remove it from a scrapbook but it's not OK to soak a 1948 Leaf card in water in an effort to flatten it out because it's warped after being stored in a humid climate for 50 years. And if spilling some tea on a card isn't considered an alteration, then neither is rinsing off that tea with some water.
At the end of the day, if you did something to a card that cannot be detected and which leaves the card in a state that is indistinguishable from a similar card that has not had that thing done to it, then you have not "altered" the card in any meaningful sense with respect to how something affects its value in the market. If a card can be cracked out and resubmitted 100 times and it passes grading all 100 times, then its market value has not been affected by whatever it is that you did to it. Regardless of whether that thing was handling it with oily fingers, wiping off fingerprints from oily fingers, storing it in plastic for decades, plucking off a stray piece of fuzz from the edge, removing wax from the surface, flattening out a bent/lifted corner with your thumb, breathing on it, licking your finger to wipe off a smudge, dropping a piece of rice on the card and then promptly removing it, soaking it in water and letting it dry flat, etc. Everything we do to a card "alters" it per your definition. So that definition doesn't work. You need to try again. You're losing your jury. But I'm sure you're used to that.