Research is lacking. Some studies are lumping store bought twinkies with vegetarian meats — which are completely different foods (and even in the fake meat category the preservatives, sodium levels, and other ingredients wildly vary).

The term “processed” Is being latched on to by the media without a clear definition of what that means/includes or clear research into the roots of what is a processed food and what’s in it that’s bad for you and why. It’s a useless “catch all” term.

So to actually answer this, there is a specific study that claimed to find some correlation between ultraprocessed food and certain health risks. The study seems to have included a picture of a meat substitute burger, and have singled out some meat alternatives despite not researching them specifically, which in turn led to a bunch of press to poorly report negative health impacts from those even though the study wasn’t really concluding that.

The rest of the article is mostly a political dance about anti-vegan policies present and future that goes into a lot of detail about categorizations of food and how the concept of processed food as a category is poorly defined, presumably because vegan food substitutes would fall under this more often. Honestly, it’s a bit of a turducken of sensationalized reporting and research built around the current state of US politics. You can save yourself the read.