The article directly proposes an alternative that "avoids some of the issues" with adding the pepper before hashing: > An alternative approach is to hash the p

The article directly proposes an alternative that "avoids some of the issues" with adding the pepper before hashing: > An alternative approach is to hash the passwords as usual and then encrypt the hashes with a symmetrical encryption key before storing them in the database, with the key acting as the pepper. This avoids some of the issues with the traditional approach to peppering, and it allows for much easier rotation of the pepper if it is believed to be compromised. It sounds to me that this is the actual recommendation and the other method is more for explaining the traditional approach. Also the two-way function has a clearly stated benefit in this case.