OK, so it sounds like apokrisis is agreeing with the article to the extent that the article is targetted only at those physicists that take physics other than instrumentally. As it happens, when I was doing my doctorat in chemistry, I was well acquainted with a few physicists working on things like string theory and the so-called Standard Model, and as apokrisis indicates, they regard the kind of issues being discussed here about "reality" as not really their domain - they leave that to metaphysicians - they just get on with developing their mathematical models and (to a more limited extent) conducting their experiments. If they had any metaphysical commitments about commonsense reality, they seemed to be largely idealists (but that could just have been the beer talking). I think it's the "folk" physicists who try to popularize the subject on TV and in books that tend to give the misleading idea that physicists presume that what they are doing is furnishing us with the literal truth. As for where that leaves commonsense - or that part of it that deals with perceptible qualities - as the article suggests, if you take physics instrumentally, you can keep thinking that commonsense allows us to glimpse what is real, but the epithet "reality" is not a halo - something's being real does not make it any better, purer or wiser than something's being ('merely') theoretical.