that chart is the classic example, as you can probably tell boss came up with it (god knows how long ago). it should be mentioned that it is an example and many people love to experiment with pedal order (you can get in a ton of arguments over where to put your compression for just one example). breaking rules can lead to some interesting sounds that may not be “correct” in some ears but some pretty huge bands have made some signature sounds doing that. the point is it’s whatever you like.
Absolutely. Treat this as a starting point for when you don’t know what you’re doing (yet). As the Reverb article already says, there are “rule breakers”. So go nuts! None this is set in stone, and nobody ever came up with something completely new by doing the same things as everybody else.
The Boss signal chain makes perfect sense if you only have one signal chain in front of the amp, if you have an fx loop I would also try to put all time based effects in the loop.