One thing this article completely glossed over is that most rice cookers you find these days don't have an outer water reservoir that boils away like the one described in the article (until reading this I thought of those as "Taiwanese style rice cookers" because the only ones I had seen like this were from Taiwan).

There is a difference between waiting for one cup in the outer reservoir to boil completely away for 20 minutes, and waiting for the rice+water mixture to come to a certain temperature.

Edit: I ended up down a rabbit hole about why Taiwanese rice cookers more commonly use indirect heat and found this great article:

https://www.taiwangazette.org/news/2021/10/23/thinking-outsi...