"Being weird? Awesome. Being deliberately different? Not so much."I realize I'm straying further afield of the original article in saying this, but we should keep in mind that being "weird" (or even being "different") isn't always a choice, or at least not a conscious one. I'm not sure if I'd go so far as to suggest that most "different" people have no agency in the matter. But a lot of them don't. Being different is a relative status typically assigned to you by the dominant social paradigm and context in which you exist. There certainly can be a choice, i.e., in whether to embrace this difference, or to attempt to amend it. And degree of self-awareness plays a huge role in the outcome. But often, even deliberate attempts to rein in the differences can fail.
Long before many (most?) of us even realized we had a conscious say in being weird, our peers made that call for us. What we're actually choosing is how to contextualize and reckon with that weirdness.
This is, as you've suggested, far different from a person's deliberately cultivating a surface-level eccentricity in an attempt to stand out (which is really just a case of fitting in by having an interesting quirk).
Finally, I'd suggest that those of us who consider ourselves "weird" or "different" -- regardless of whether that label has been intrinsically or extrinsically imposed -- should take a very nuanced and almost surgical view of it. By self-analyzing the weirdness, you can break it down into its components and decide which elements are useful, which are harmful, which are productive, which are counterproductive. "Weird" or "different" can be reduced to more elementary traits, rather than seen as broad, blanket terms. The broad terms may be value-neutral, but the smaller components often have values (good or bad).