Yes but they are not equivalent. dict and list are factories; {} and [] are reified when the code is touched and then never reinitialised again. This catches out beginners and LLMs alike:
https://www.inspiredpython.com/article/watch-out-for-mutable...
They are equivalent. In function signatures (what your article is talking about), using dict() instead of {} will have the same effect. The only difference is that {} is a literal of an empty dict, and dict is a name bound to the builtin dict class. So you can reassign dict, but not {}, and if you use dict() instead of {}, then you have a name lookup before a call, so {} is a little more efficient.
I wrote the link and yes it does. Module evaluations reify {}, [], etc. once. That is why people keep making subtle bugs when they do `def foo(a=[]):` unaware that this will in fact not give you a brand new list on every function call.
Factory functions like list/tuple/set are function calls and are executed and avoid this problem. Hence why professional python devs default to `None` and check for that and _then_ initialise the list internally in the function body.
Adding {/} as empty set is great, sure; but that again is just another reified instance and the opposite of set() the function.
That article is about how defaults for arguments are evaluated eagerly. It doesn't real have to do with dict vs {}.
However, using the literal syntax does seem to be more efficient. So that is an argument for having dedicated syntax for an empty set.