Very interesting, pity the author chose such a poor example for the explanation (low, artificial and multicoloured light), making it really hard to understand what the "ground truth" and expected result should be.
I'm not sure I understand your complaint. The "expected result" is either of the last two images (depending on your preference), and one of the main points of the post is to challenge the notion of "ground truth" in the first place.
Not a complaint, but both the final images have poor contrast, lighting, saturation and colour balance, making them a disappointing target for an explanation of how these elements are produced from raw sensor data.
That’s because it requires much more sophisticated processing to produce pleasing results. The article is showing you the absolute basic steps in the processing pipeline and also that you don’t really want an image that is ‘unprocessed’ to that extent (because it looks gross).
No, the last image is the "camera" version of it- though it's not clear if he means the realtime processing before snapping the picture or with the postprocessing that happens right after. Anyway, we have no way to understand how far the basic-processed raw picture is from a pleasing or normal-looking result because a) the lighting is so bad and artificial that we have no idea of how "normal" should look; b) the subject is unpleasant and the quality "gross" in any case.
