sorry, I was afk.

Yes, that's exactly what the article is saying. If you burn calories doing exercise, the body will spend less on stress response. But if you burn less (or none) on exercise, then it will spend more on other things, eventually coming to roughly the same calorie expenditure (as they measured). Which is why exercise helps with depression - your brain has less calories available to spend on stress responses and generally messing with your mood.

You really should read the article.

Even different workouts have very different calorie outcome. E.g. running at steady pace burns more than bicycle riding at steady pace at similar heart rate.