The cost of virtual calls (and calls in general) in the article is greatly exaggerated. Jumps, calls and indirect calls have an effective latency of zero as they are resolved in the fetch stage (and speculated if the target is not known) and a troughput of one taken jump every one or two cycles.

In a virtual call, the offset computation and load is only used to compute the jump target (which is only used later on commit), which means that is not on the critical path [1].

They consume execution and load bandwith, but that's not normally the bottleneck. The cost of virtual cals is usually due to missed optimizations and the possibility of misprediction.

[1] technically if the load is delayed long enough, the CPU might be prevented from committing the speculated instructions and eventually exhaust its reoerder buffer and stall.