To me it feels like the author of that project didn't get the point of resets. The problem without resets is not that some client/manager/designer wants to see

To me it feels like the author of that project didn't get the point of resets. The problem without resets is not that some client/manager/designer wants to see a pixel perfect page, but that differently sized default elements in different browsers can cause whole layouts to break / become non-functional. If your layout is robust enough to compensate such variations, that's fine and you probably don't need a reset CSS at all, but the idea of reset CSS is not about efficiency in terms of lines of code, but about efficiency of developer resources. Developing something on top of a 100% defined state is much easier than constantly having to worry about different initial states. Yes, resets aren't pretty, they are pragmatic.