I have no problem with the image and it illustrates a real phenomena. There is something slightly misleading about it though: if you point a camera in the same direction for 2 hours, take many images and then layer the images you wouldn't have a static star background like is shown here. You'd only get that star background if you used a star tracker and kept pointing at the same place in the night sky but then the foreground would be changing.

No it is correct. I dabble in astrophotography.

The purpose of stacking hundreds of photos is to get rid of noise and unwanted trails like this.

The effort involved here is to go out of your way to do the exact opposite, specifically make sure things that are in a single exposure show up in the stack.

The image itself is interesting, but the context in which it’s presented in this article is dishonest.

The headline is the worst offender, saying that the skies are “choked” with satellites.

The headline is misleading. The photo alone is interesting with the right context.

If you do the exact opposite then? You take a very long exposure and you mask away the satellite trails and post the image as "image of how the satellites don't pollute the sky".. that's the exact same thing in reverse.

Both can't be non-misleading right?