I guess I could understand why this would be borderline impossible if you did it manually, but surely today with satellite images and computer vision it really shouldn’t be that difficult to agree on a standard unit and then just automate it. Surely just make the scale human at its smallest (meters works and can get converted from there, assuming you have sufficient zoom level data for the coastline) and call it a day - I have no clue why we are discussing atomic fractal calculus approaching the limit as if that's a real problem for agencies trying to give a cogent answer about a particular country's coastline.
The article is not about practical measurements at all. Doing it manually has nothing to do with it. It is explicitly about why the measured length depends on the precision you choose to measure with.
The article spends a lot of time acting like this is some intractable problem and that its intractability is the reason there is so much discrepancy between countries and agencies.