Look up any of the place names mentioned in that article, every one has the diacritics removed. Imagine if a magazine removed all the vowels from American English. "Bdn flw frm Nw Yrk t Ls Ngls"
I was reading this this thread about how the New York Times butchers all the diacritics from non English languages and I was like this must be fake theres no way they still do this so I looked up a recent article about Vietnam and fucking hell they are still doing this.
Here is an article (unpaywalled) you can look at to verify https://archive.ph/dzV80
via nostr:npub1qh4qyvwn6k3asq22h3mmwa4wgvnvd4ntrl4kj32zgh040k6zd9nqvyq43p
Discussion
nostr:npub1k08pe3kghynslu5gh9cqyguud2lyk5fl84wqm073tzxqnmk04ygskh6xvn In many languages (Czech is the one with which I'm familiar), removing diacritics *changes the letter*. An 's' with a hacek over it is a different letter than an s without. Just as ñ and n are different letters in Spanish.
To reframe your analogy, the NYT isn't removing vowels, but it's randomly replacing vowels with different vowels.