todays 1-inch thumb drives ... last much longer
Nope. Anything you have stored on flash is a charge on a capacitor that is slowly draining away.
Now I know for a fact that your article's claim to 1-year thumb-drive data retention is inaccurate, as I've personally had thumb drive data last much longer than 1 year.
It depends, of course, on the quality of the thumb drive being used, how often and exactly how it is being used, how and where it is stored, etc., but if you do a simple Google search on something like 'thumb drive data life expectancy', many technical sites declare that thumb-drive data can last for 10 years or more.