Actually, the article is titled “The Salary a Single Person Needs to Get By in Every U.S. State”. And they go on to define their meaning of “getting by” as:
the minimum amount a single person would need to follow the 50/30/20 budget, using data from Bureau of Labor Statistics. Following this outline, 50% of income is used to cover necessities, such as housing and utility costs, 30% goes toward discretionary spending, and 20% is left for savings or investments.
So they really mean what they said, and I still don’t see the relavancy of you putting words in their mouth or using your own definitions. I mean, if you want to have a linguistics debate with them on the acceptable usage of “getting by”, more power to you I guess. But as they have defined their terms, its essentially a strawman argument against a silly for fun article.