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Do you remember 2016? Most pollsters picked Hillary to win. It was not "super accurate". Most people were shocked by the outcome.
And no, Trump isn't "less unpopular" than Biden. That's the point of the article. Based on the current polls, Trump should not be struggling at all against a centrist candidate that no one knows (Nikki Haley). That's like a pro team having trouble beating a college team. It's not good and shows large problems.
Biden only has pressure from the left, and there isn't even a candidate that can stand against him. The "no one" votes, are mainly people saying they want a generic progressive who doesn't exist right now. In the general election, it's much harder to overcome centrists who dislike you than right or left wing voters.
I remember. The polls were accurate. The pundits were not. People were shocked because they didn't want to believe that there are really that many loathsome morons around, not because they looked at what polls said.
Here are the main polls for that race on the eve of the election. What they actually said was that the race was close to a tossup, with Clinton perhaps very slightly favoured to win.
Here and here are favourability ratings. As you can see, Trump's are substantially less negative.
You are comparing "approval" ratings with "favorability" ratings. Trump has no favorability ratings because he's not in office. These are not the same.
Biden's "favorability" is lower because there are people who want him to be more progressive. That doesn't mean they won't vote for him in a race against Trump.
You can't use "favorability" to gauge whether people will vote because it compares the candidate to a mythical generic person. The ballot doesn't ask "do you like what Joe Biden is doing?" it asks "do you prefer Biden or Trump?"
Those are very different questions. Biden will pull ahead once people actually think about Trump being president. It's not a hypothetical like in 2016. He was president and he lost in 2020.
I wasn't saying favourability ratings should be used to predict elections. For that you have polls (in which Trump has a substantial but not decisive lead). I was just responding to the comment about who is more unpopular.
I think that people who respond to pollsters overwhelmingly know that Trump was president before, and clearly it doesn't bother them what a train wreck that presidency was. It's not clear to me how they would suddenly start realizing that closer to election day.