What you would have liked to see is besides the point. Nowhere did the author tell us he was interested in finding out what running the code would do rather tha

What you would have liked to see is besides the point. Nowhere did the author tell us he was interested in finding out what running the code would do rather than what the string said. So there's no failure here, and the 'right way' people are bringing up here (decoding b64 algorithmically) would produce no more meaningful a result.