There is no threads account. There is no way to make a threads account. You sign in with ig. Threads really appears to be a subset of barebones and stripped down ig. Calling it a marriage of accounts seems misleading, it’s really just another Instagram client with rebooted follow list, that only lets you see posts from the new client.
The article title is absolutely written in a misleading and inflammatory way to sort of imply, without outright lying, that someone might run into a screen that causes them to accidentally delete their Instagram account. (I get a different title in yc and tc, not sure if tc is showing multiple headlines to different people depending on factors.)
The “The discovery of this stipulation has surprised many users” line in the article is one of those staples of modern journalism where they take a couple tweets or threads now, and make them out to be prevailing sentiment. Cite your sources on who is surprised TechCrunch.
threads has always been heavily advertised with its Instagram integration. the app is called "threads, an Instagram app" and the onboarding flow itself is based on your existing insta follows. you can disagree with this strategy but it's definitely not unintuitive or unnecessary, they make it extremely clear
The relevant bit is the completely non-intuitive (and one could assume unnecessary) marriage of the two profiles.