As noted in the article, Google pays Adblock Plus an undisclosed amount of money to be considered non-intrusive. Adblock Plus is clearly not a neutral evaluator here.

Adblock Plus is pretty open about it. You can disable the option easily. And Google ads are, in fact, relatively non intrusive. I don't see the problem.

I'm not opposed to an exception for acceptable ads; I think it's a good idea. My only problem is that it seems to be a serious conflict of interest to accept money from ad providers for this.

As long as the accepted ads are really non-intrusive, there's no conflict. There would be a conflict if you could pay Adblock Plus to accept browser-hijacking popups.

Reviewing ads takes time. Time is money. It's perfectly reasonable to charge for the review process.