It is not the point of the article that actual conflicts between ethnicities should be reframed as something other than what they are; it's that their journalists have to describe the animus between Serbs and Bosniaks directly, and not roll the whole thing up into "an ethnic conflict". They're not avoiding the concept of ethnicity, just the generalizing, overly-broad (for their purposes) term.

But it's often not right to describe the animus "directly", if that's understood to mean (as they describe in the article) uncritically reporting what the people involved say about the conflict. The Troubles are the best English-language example, because there are piles and piles of primary source material with inflammatory and incompatible claims about the nature of the conflict. Was it religious, or racial, or linguistic, or geographic? All of the above and none, depending on who you ask. In fact, you'll note that "the Troubles" as a term is a response to the same issue - it would be extraordinarily unhelpful if news organizations felt obligated to choose between calling the conflict "IRA terrorism" or "British colonial aggression", even though basically every participant believed one of those two terms to be more accurate and precise.

I guess to some degree it does depend on what their purposes are, because there's value in understanding what average people in the area are thinking. But it's hard to imagine a news organization that never needs to mention a conflict without taking a position on it, and easy to imagine an organization which silently glosses over the issue because they assume there's a right side and trust the sympathetic voices they're talking to are on it.