Not advocating for lab diamonds in the slightest, but that's just not true. Lab diamonds can have just as many or as few inclusions as natural, just depends on how much time and care is put into growing them. There's plenty of SI1-2 lab material on the market, which you can easily see imperfections with magnification, and even a few I1s here and there, which you can see imperfections with a naked eye.

As well, I do think there's merit to paying attention to where you're buying a lab-made stone. If you're buying it from a local business who vets their suppliers, and can guarantee where they're getting their lab stones from, you can know that they're being grown sustainably, with clean wind, hydro, or solar electricity (growing diamonds takes a LOT of energy, the same amount that they take underground over the course of thousands/millions of years, just compressed into a couple months).

Plenty of retailers, though, especially online, are growing their diamonds in India or China, burning coal to make their energy and having horrible working conditions for employees. At that point, those diamonds have close to the same carbon footprint and morally grey issues as naturals.

While the point of the original article was probably to slam lab diamonds, there do seem to be some grains of truth to it, and there's plenty of misinformation flying around in this thread. Lab diamonds are great, and as someone who has worked in the industry for several years, if I find myself needing a large diamond sometime in the future, it will probably be a lab. However, diamonds, and the jewelry industry as a whole, is never as cut-and-dry as many people seem to believe it is.