I think my explanation, your zig-zag one, and the article's are describing the same thing with slightly different emphasis. The zig-zag is what you get when you compose a bunch of what I'm visualizing together, and it's the sort of thing that gets worse when you add more measurements of shorter distances. Balancing it is the corner-cutting effect which gets better with more measurements (which the paper you linked describes as "interpolation" which it intentionally did not analyze).
