The first link is just quoting the social media post verbatim. Treat it with the same degree of reliability as "this guy said on Facebook/Twitter..."

Second article actually goes out of its way to say how uncommon it is to be punished for circumventing the firewall:

“Climbing the firewall results in punishment” is not the norm A common misunderstanding among the public about circumvention is that anyone who circumvents the wall will be punished. This is unrealistic for two reasons: first, the public security organs do not have that many law enforcement police; second, the public security organs are not as busy as you think. Most of the time, the punishment for circumventing the wall is to pull out the radish and bring out the mud. There are typical cases where the public security organs take the initiative to go to the external network to arrest people, but the number is very small.

Judging from the 50 cases, only one case adopted the first-level "extreme law enforcement model", that is, the "use of circumvention software is punishable" model. The description of the case was "A certain person used his own mobile phone to use a VPN on the Internet to circumvent the firewall." Wall software, its behavior constitutes the unauthorized use of non-legal channels for international networking." Even so, the actual situation of enforcement may be different from the description of the administrative penalty decision.