Good question. I agree that there is something of an issue with attendance, but I think the situation is less bad than the article suggests. In my experience as a lecturer, yes students do adopt more of a selective, instrumental approach to attendance than used to be the case in the days of a smaller cohort of students who were told they must turn up or else, and that they were privileged to be there. But it's easy to focus on the non-attenders rather than the attenders (especially since lecturers often spend a lot of time chasing the non-attenders). In my experience, to give them credit, most students do turn up most of the time, despite the fact that they are indeed often in paid work for more hours than should really be compatible with full time study. I am very proud of what my students achieve despite sometimes very challenging circumstances. Which is important because these discussions can easily become divisive: students and staff should both feel part of a shared learning community and have a common interest in an education system that works better.
But: in these days of a more consumerist model of education (which I regret in many ways), as a lecturer you have to work hard to maintain student attendance: you can't just take it as a given. So yes it does vary from course to course. I would advise speaking to students and staff on open days for the relevant course to get a specific sense, but as a very rough general rule, the more prestigious the university, the less well designed the teaching is and the less monitored attendance is likely to be. That's both because academics in the more prestigious universities are under massive pressure to focus on research grants rather than teaching, and because Russell Group university courses often over-recruit very large numbers of students (because they can, and because the government has created a dog-eat-dog ultra-competitive market in higher education). The figure quoted in the Guardian from 'a prestigious university in southern England' that 'On a good day, attendance is 30%' looks like something has gone wrong with that course: I've never had attendance that low in over two decades of teaching at universities perceived as relatively less prestigious. If as a lecturer you are lucky enough to be teaching a subject that attracts students with a genuine interest in it; you are excited and passionate about your subject; you make an effort to make your subject accessible to students; you work hard to generate a sense of belonging, and earn the respect of your students from your very first sessions; you explicitly tell students why it's important to attend; and there hasn't been some timetabling mess-up: then the good news is that most students will probably continue to turn up most weeks.
Though however good the lecturer is, attendance is never going to be 100%, as inevitably stuff happens outside their or students' control. For example: a student's employer changes their shift time, or there is a family emergency. Also the bar to not turning up has become a bit lower for a number of reasons. Some of them are positive: society post-Covid has evolved a somewhat more understanding approach to illness, physical or mental. Hence more draconian attendance policies are rarer in universities today than they used to be (unlike schools!) as they could be unintentionally discriminatory. Some of the reasons are less positive: it is now considered normal to not turn up the week coursework assignments are due - which many students do, forgetting that this may be detrimental to their learning for less immediate future assessments like the exam.
So good universities have strategies in place for non-attendance. When students don't turn up, and miss more than the occasional session, at more teaching-focused universities, especially ones with fewer students where staff know the students individually, staff are likely to monitor them individually and give them pastoral support and listen to them to find out what is wrong, and direct them to the university's range of specialist sources of support for their difficulties, that can hopefully help students improve their attendance. In this respect and some others, we have become more like sixth-form teachers than we might have expected at the beginning of our academic careers (which may be something to be proud of). Such a level of support may, with the best will in the world, be much harder to do on very large courses at Russell Group universities, with a culture of more traditional expectations of their students and staff, and vast numbers of students. Which is why I would hesitate to recommend such courses to any but the most self-motivated of students. But whatever course you are on, do engage with it as fully as you can in the circumstances you are in: university at its best can be an amazing adventure and the more you put in to your studies, the more you will get out of them. Go for it!