That's very well put and I think you are correct. I wanted to add though that, to me personally, the author's comment doesn't register as "you're not smart" at

That's very well put and I think you are correct. I wanted to add though that, to me personally, the author's comment doesn't register as "you're not smart" at all. Rather I read it as message along the lines of "don't worry if you don't understand this piece of code, I didn't either". And in this instance the joke works pretty well because the code resists almost all the normal mental tools a programmer has developed to analyse and understand an unknown piece of code. The joke reads as a gentle challenge to try to understand it without help, but not to try too hard: no one can reasonably expect you to reverse-engineer this by yourself.