You share public keys when registering the passkey on a third party service, but for the portability of the keys to other password managers (what the article is about) the private ones do need to be transferred (that’s the whole point of making them portable).
I think the phishing concerns are about attackers using this new portability feature to get a user (via phishing / social engineering) to export/move their passkeys to the attacker’s store. The point is that portability shouldn’t be so user-friendly / transparent that it becomes exploitable.
That said, I don’t know if this new protocol makes things THAT easy to port (probably not?).
It’s true that they say both things out of comfort.
Though to be completely honest, both statements are not contradictory. They are not necessarily accepting that they do have something worth hiding, but just stating that hiding is too difficult these days anyway. That does not mean (sadly) that they would start doing it were it easier, just that they have even less of a motive to care about it now that hiding is so much harder (to the point of almost being “a myth”).
I’m not saying they are right, I’m saying that lack of consistency is not the problem with that attitude. It’s not a “shift”, just a consistent continuation of a lazy attitude towards comfort.