God, that article is stupid. To actually answer OP:
No, you don't play as gods. You play as exceptionally mighty humans, on the scale of Gilgamesh or Heracles, the kind of people who can literally wrestle down a thunderstorm or tear the secrets of immortality from the throat of the First of all Deaths. Depending on what type of Exalted you are, you have a different aesthetic: the "default" option, the Solar Exalted, are heavily themed around superhuman excellence (make a logical deduction indistinguishable from prophecy, forge gracefulness into a shield, smile and win the heart of a demon who has never known an emotion other than ceaseless hate for humanity, reach out with your sword and cut apart your opponent's very Fate) and golden sunlight and things like that, although this isn't a paladin kind of thing - a cruel and sociopathic Solar who makes herself a slaver queen or a barbarian warlord fond of cannibalism shines just as brightly and beautifully as the noblest hero among them. Solars are made from normal humans (only a rare few) in a moment of superhuman conviction, when ordinary people dare the impossible. A thief who wants to steal a little extra time, a guardsman who faces down a volcano god gone mad, an investigator chasing after a murderer who uses destiny to do its killings, et cetera.
No, they never had rape ghosts. There was a short "preview" of the 3E revisions of Abyssal Exalted - themed around undeath, destruction, suffering, darkness, absolute annihilation, et cetera - with a two-line magical ability, out of eventual hundreds to come, that makes you more beautiful but also causes "ravishing spectres" to show up and moon around you.
Some overzealous soul decried the use of the word ravishing, ignoring its obvious context of seduction by desperate amorousness and jumping straight to the lesser-used archaic definition of rape. The devs said no, we mean the usual definition and everything exploded because how dare they.
Note that as an Abyssal, you can very casually have entire towns of spectral souls press-ganged, melted down, and reforged into terrible black metal constantly distorted by hands and faces pressing against from the inside. You can carry a bundle of this stuff. You ain't afraid of no ghost, even if it was a rape ghost, which it wasn't.
Abyssals isn't a nice game, though. Terrible things do happen - the Lover Clad in the Raiment of Tears comes to mind - but the devs are pretty firmly in the same camp as the people attacking them. It was stupid to even imagine they'd toss rape ghosts out casually.