...no, you're not understanding it correctly. I literally have no clue how you could have gotten that from the article, unless you didn't actually read it. It's stated pretty clearly how he allegedly ended up using Yoshi.

If you're familiar with any sort of business where you might need to buy stock materials, there are sites that host hundreds of thousands of assets for various needs-- images, movie clips, sound, etc. This guy went to a rather popular bank of 3D assets and purchased a set of renders that happened to be Yoshi, claiming he didn't know it was a famous character.

This isn't as shady as it sounds-- huge developers often use stock assets from things like Unreal Engine 3 and so on, as well as most user made mods in games.

The likelihood of him not recognizing Yoshi? It's entirely possible, sure, but if he's developing video games solely on his own, he's got to have some affinity for the medium and I can't fathom how one of the industry's most recognizable faces was lost on him.

Why?

Cause Nintendo cares about its fans, lol.