I see what you're saying, but the article was not about "cheap and dirty" at all. They describe a precisely tuned system, riding on the controlled application of brute force. Like a rocket to Mars.
This approach is precisely what PHK was arguing against. That position paper basically says "Go ahead and do the logically correct thing and let the OS and VM (memory) take care of making it efficient".
It reminds me a lot of the paper that Poul-Henning Kamp wrote about "1975 programming". Few of us really appreciate how to use modern hardware. https://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/ArchitectNotes