Apple's record on privacy and business model give me pretty high confidence on this one.

Google may have an incentive to add call info to the profile they keep on you, but surely you're not thinking that they are as big of a privacy risk as some random third-party that puts a dialer up on the play store.

Edit: I couldn't get the article to load, so I'm going by the other comments to assume this was about scammy dialers tricking regular users on Android into installing them. Obviously a dialer on a custom ROM modified for extra privacy is a justifiable reason for making it replaceable on Android.

He's actually writing about the dialer that comes with the device OS (in this case an OTA, I believe, but still, it's the default / 1P dialer. It just happens to be a branded one rather than the "usual" white label dialer a smaller OEM might provide.