I never would have interpreted the headline to mean "the same exact plane"?

It's not the same exact plane, but another article mentions a Boeing employee who did have nightmares about specific planes being sold to Air India. This plane was produced shortly after the time when she was keeping track of those ones:

Cynthia Kitchens, a former quality manager who worked at the Charleston plant between 2009 and 2016, has a binder full of notes, documents and photos from her frustrating years at Boeing, one page of which lists the numbers of the eleven planes delivered between early 2012 and late 2013 whose quality defects most kept her awake at night. Six of them went to Air India, whose purchases were bolstered by billions of dollars in Export-Import Bank loan guarantees. The plane that crashed was delivered in January 2014 from Boeing’s now-defunct assembly line in Everett, Washington, though its mid- and aft- fuselages were produced in Charleston.

Calling it "obviously clickbait" is far stretch. Yeah the sentence can be interpreted as meaning exact plane, but can also refer to the enitre model series. All the stories, and the whistleblower, were warning about explicit systemic issues at the company and with specific models. Therefor its not wrong, and also making a point of the connection seems like important news to me.

So you thought it was the exact same vehicle the whistleblower was talking about? I don't. Think they would have been blowing the whistle of the problem as a single plane. Obviously they are referring to the model, not the literal flying machine.