This is kind of a silly article. There's a huge amount of dust spam in the blockchain. This particular tx looks to me like somebody paying a tiny bit to clean u

This is kind of a silly article. There's a huge amount of dust spam in the blockchain. This particular tx looks to me like somebody paying a tiny bit to clean up some of the easy-to-clean txs. It's not some gigantic mystery. The linked core dev chat even says something along the lines of "appreciated, but not the most important thing to do right this second". That single transaction cleared out lots and lots of spam, but there's lots more to go, apparently: a comment on the dev logs notes that there's more than 200k more dust spam txs in those addresses. As a side note, Blockchain.info isn't super easy to deal with for txs this large; I wouldn't trust all the data on the page to be accurate.