I imagine that maybe you're suggesting you first query the DB for the ID of the combined status_category, and then query the article by that ID. That's not a good idea, for a couple of reasons. First, you're making two round trips to the DB when you could, with no additional effort (just effort in a different place) be doing one. Second, you've introduced a data race condition. If someone deletes that status_category after you've queried for it but before you've queried the articles, you aren't going to get the results you want.

It would be better to do a join across articles to status_category to status and category, then query based on the status and category values you want. Without an index on the FKs between status_category and status and category, a relatively small table can have a big impact on query performance.

Finally, while I know your example is arbitrary, it's a little hard to argue against a design that is probably wrong. I doubt the suggested schema for articles and categories is a good one. If I argue "you should never have to arbitrarily subtract '1' from a result just to get the results you want", it would not be a good counterargument to say, "yes, but sometimes you want to add 2 and 2 and get 5, so then you need to subtract 1". The problem isn't where you see it.

FKs aren't just a consistency tool. Consistency and referential integrity are features that results from having an FK, but the FK is a signal that data can be searched in a certain way.