As a German, pretty much all of the intersections shown in the article trigger me quite a bit. In Germany, there's a standardized Autobahnkreuz [1] most of the time. If it's a construction site or an incompleted Autobahn intersection, it's usually called Autobahndreieck (and not -kreuz) on the signs.
This way, all drivers can already sort themselves onto the matching lanes without even having seen the signs yet.
The standardized Autobahnkreuz also has always identical ways to change directions, where the left lane leaving the highway is made for change in opposite direction or for turnarounds. So if you took the wrong exit, you can always save yourself by just driving that lane 3 times across the bridge.
If the traffic increases over time, usually the right exit lanes are doubled and that fixes the problem.
Rarely though there's different setups like around the A61 and A67 where the traffic around and towards Frankfurt city / airport is too huge for that system.
MKAD, the 101km circle road around Moscow had almost exclusively this style of intersections up until 2010s, when congestion got absolutely unbearable. Then all of them got rebuilt, typically adding overhead ramps, tunnels, and crazy-long but separate right lines, and by now it's almost impossible to navigate w/o gps navigator (which gets jammed often). Also forget about easily changing direction.
Results can be seen on f.ex https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/55.88242/37.72732
Damn, this is pretty interesting that they had to add the additional bridges.
Does that imply that the merge of two lanes is still too costly?
Also it seems the lane from south east to south west is missing :D it's somehow routed via north first and then goes around the circle.
> Does that imply that the merge of two lanes is still too costly?
Yes.
This one https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/55.88495/37.47959 was built from scratch not very long ago. Notice how merges/splits are spread as far as possible.