Well, that point is most likely lost on someone who dies in a crash of these cars. IE, the difference is big from some viewpoints but irrelevant from others.
I think we can see the point where objections to self-driving cars start to become strong. It's not some cooked-up version of the "trolley car problem" but a situation where a self-driving car does something a human observer naturally interprets as "wrong" and "dumb", does it in a way that kills someone and the designers give the answer "sorry, not a mistake, just a necessary design compromise. This is still, on-average safer than a human". I think this would produce a strong emotional effect regardless of any "generally safer" assertion.
A person is dead mainly due to the presence of a driver-assist system, this is unquestionable.
All I'm saying is that the distinction is important from the perspective of someone who wants to prevent this from happening again, and the perspective of someone who is in charge of making the laws and regulations to prevent this from happening again, and the perspective of the people voting for those lawmakers.
As to whether this article is really a stealth advertisement for GM's Super Cruise technology, well... yeah, it probably is. But I still found it informative as to the current state of driver assistance systems. I was not aware that the cruise control, lane keeping, and automatic braking systems were generally completely independent of each other.