It seems like you were reading the article with a mindset like "how do I save half a million dollars in my code with a one character change?" and were annoyed t

It seems like you were reading the article with a mindset like "how do I save half a million dollars in my code with a one character change?" and were annoyed to find a bunch of other stuff that didn't directly answer your question. But if you actually read the whole thing, it's clearly a meditation on the classic tradeoff of readability vs performance optimization, when micro optimizations are and aren't worth it, and how we should be deciding when to focus on one aspect or another. The single character change thing was just one particularly salient example that he uses to drive a point home. Reading it without a preconceived idea and letting the article itself explain its purpose to me, I found it pretty well written. There's been plenty written about this tradeoff over the years and this was far from the worst I've seen.