That article (which I believe was originally written in 2016) makes no mention of the workflow "workaround" that you think you have discovered, so I'm not sure what point you were making with that reference.
Just recapping, you wanted a way to circumvent the automatic downloading of synced images into LR Classic, as you thought this was a "bit silly", and you think you've discovered a way to do that. John Beardsworth's response was that this is the way it is designed and best try not to get too clever. That advice is based on his own knowledge of the way that syncing works (which in turn is based on days, weeks and months of testing, not the one hour that you say you spent), and his own knowledge of the Adobe position on this subject (have a read of this article: https://prolost.com/blog/migratinglightroom​ for some insight into some of the issues, and note the unequivocal Adobe Marketing's position).
However, in your testing you have indeed discovered that you can get around having Classic download the full Raw files, though quite why that's important to you I cannot guess. By far the most time-consuming part of the sync process is generally the upload, which you cannot avoid if importing from any part of the system except Classic. So having gone through the upload process you're trying to figure out a way of avoiding the ensuing download even though that's typically a small fraction of the total sync time. Having done that, you've discovered that LR Classic's duplicate detection works and consequently only downloads the image metadata which is applied to a VC that it creates from the original that you imported. Now what....you've got the original import which is not synced, and a VC of it that IS synced. So only edits from the VC will sync across the ecosystem, not those from the original in Classic. If that's what you want, then that's fine. Personally I'd only want to use VCs when I have a desire for completely separate treatment of an image, not have them exist through some quirk of the compromised syncing between Classic and the cloud.
There are of course ways to clean this up, but they're not overly attractive. You could, for example, enable syncing in Classic of the masters....so then you'll be syncing both the master and the VC from Classic, but LRCC doesn't support VCs, so it will in fact automatically create a full copy in the cloud of the original image....and good luck telling which is which when deciding to do some editing in one of the LRCC apps. Or, if you've been been careful enough to only edit in LRCC, so only the VCs in Classic have edits, you could promote all the VCs to be the master....that retains the correct sync status that you'd want (i.e. the new master will have the VCs edits and its sync status), so you could then remove the VCs.....but what is now the master still retains the original VC's copy name, and if you're OCD like me you'll want to edit that out. And if you've edited BOTH the Classic import and the synced VC, and you only want one copy in the cloud, you'll have to figure out how to do that.
To be honest, none of that jumping through hoops is worth it to me....IMO it's much easier and cleaner to let the sync work as it was designed to. But that's your call.
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