It's been a while since I read CL Wilson's Lord of the Fading Lands (and the rest of the books in that series), but IIRC some of what you touch on is why I loved the stories. Wilson looks at what happens (to secondary characters) when the mating bonds can't be completed or one person rejects the bond. What happens if they're used to blackmail/torture enemies? What happens if one person is already legally married when the mating bond presents itself (with someone else)? What if one person consents to the mating bond, but the other isn't really sure? The series had its weaknesses, but I loved its exploration of what it means to have these mating bonds floating around and, yes, leading to true love, but sometimes becoming emotional traps with devastating consequence.

Generally, though, I'm not sure if there's a solution to the mated HEA. I think for paranormal romance, where most h/h are immortal or at least long-lived, the mating bond serves as a reassurance that no, they won't succumb to the 700-year itch. In many ways, the codependence is something I often consciously ignore because it helps prop up the happy ending. (Some authors/books do it much better than others, of course. That makes a huge difference in the quality of the HEA for me.)

But you make excellent points and I feel that I have to think about this a lot more.

Do you have a link to the article? I doubt it would be open epub. ADE also has a DRM-ed epub version, which is probably what the libraries will be using.
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I think it depends on the execution. If it makes you feel like the author is confused then something is wrong. But I agree more closely to James Woods' view in this interview (there's a link to the transcript - just search 'third person' to get to the relevant bit):

...there's this idea, a popular idea I think, that third person omniscient narrative...is old fashioned in part because it's so stable and omniscient and that really if you want to strike against that you should be writing first person narration; more unreliable, more personal, more vocal and so on. I just tried to show actually that third person narration is incredibly flexible and has its own kind of unreliability too, and one of the things I talk about is the way that third person narrative tends to wrap itself around the character who's being described. All writers do this, I think, instinctively and they don't necessarily use the accepted critical term for it, which is 'free indirect style', they just call it third person writing or close third person or intimate third. But they understand what I'm talking about.
And he goes on to give an example, which I think is similar to the one you give above but is better executed. I'd love to hear what you think of his view of third person narrative, because I think one of the points he makes is that this type of narrative has existed for a long time and it's a stylistic choice made by the author.

I'm told that ADE is also used if you want to borrow ebooks from the library (Australian libraries use Overdrive). It's one of the reasons I've resisted buying a Kindle despite its very attractive price.
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