Hello, Thanks for the comment.
The article you are referring to was written in 2012.
In an annual Google conference I asked this question of Matt himself. There was no update banning exact match domain. It's simply cannot be done. People buy domains for many reasons. There is no strong basis for the argument that exact match domains are spam domains. What the "Panda" update did for that was, it collected the creation date of domains and alert the web spam team to look in to bundle domain purchases and look for spam content. After that actions are taken manually. To this day there is no such policy against "exact match domains".
What I'm advising you to do is have the keywords in the URL. Having your main keyword in the domain makes it easier to make a relevant links to any part of the website without much effort.
What matters is the content quality of the website. Make the website worth to read, you will rank very well
Thanks for asking the question