So, what you're really saying is that it's quite accurate, there are just details and more details but in the end - as long as we use a single clock - signals need to be able to travel from one end to the other in a single clock cycle.
Now, if we had (partially) clockless processors...
Also, your details are a lot more misleading than those in the article. lots of things in a modern processor take 1 clock cycle. Agner has lovely tables:www.agner.org/optimize/ and note that most basic integer and floating point operations on a skylake processor take 1 cycle - things like bit shuffling, moving, adding (not floats), and quite a few incidental other operations. Now, I'm sure you can quibble that a latency of 1 cycle in that table isn't really 1 cycle under some unusual interpretation of what's going on, but at that point you're quibbling about what "doing something" means, which isn't helpful. What programmers/compiler writers call 1 clock cycle can execute what most people call 1 instruction for many common instructions, even today.
Now, if we had (partially) clockless processors...
Also, your details are a lot more misleading than those in the article. lots of things in a modern processor take 1 clock cycle. Agner has lovely tables:www.agner.org/optimize/ and note that most basic integer and floating point operations on a skylake processor take 1 cycle - things like bit shuffling, moving, adding (not floats), and quite a few incidental other operations. Now, I'm sure you can quibble that a latency of 1 cycle in that table isn't really 1 cycle under some unusual interpretation of what's going on, but at that point you're quibbling about what "doing something" means, which isn't helpful. What programmers/compiler writers call 1 clock cycle can execute what most people call 1 instruction for many common instructions, even today.