It sounds like you're confusing the words "reference" and "object". If you replace the
word "reference" in your paraphrase of Eckel with the word "object", then it's correct. In the sentence from Corey's article, yes, a reference is "created", although this is really not such an event as an object being created, which is what Bruce is actually concerned with.
An "object" is a real, physical lump of memory, whereas a "reference" is a pointer to such a lump -- a "name" for it. Objects are created on the heap when you use "new"; references don't need creating, and they can live either on the stack or in the heap.