I think this is pedantic to the point of ironically making your counterargument quite flawed.

The directions you are talking about are actually referred to as "up" and "down" in input parlance (not as "forward" and "backward"), and it seems rather obvious that that's how/why the article is using those terms. This isn't even a gaming or controller specific thing - the similar arrow keys are also called Arrow Up and Arrow Down, not Arrow Forward and Arrow Backward, despite your keyboard actually typically being on a plane parallel to the ground.