Basically, Knuth was writing a beautiful but excessively low level program. His challenger wrote a dozen lines of shell-script.
Incidentally, a couple of days after that thread, the current fastest submissions (which, like Knuth, all use tries) were posted at the question https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/188133/bentleys... mentioned in a sibling comment. (AFAICT that comment should say "200 times faster", not "30 times faster", but anyway in light of the original context it's not meaningful to compare the two approaches either for efficiency or ease of implementation or anything else.)
Yes, my 'challenger' didn't mean to imply a formal contest.
I guess, if you really wanted to solve this fast, you'd massively parallelize.
In any case, this was more about easy of implementation than about runtime speed.
"Bust a NAT" is anything but easy, however.
With a Cisco ASA or Fortigate which tends to keep the same source port where possible you'll converge far more quickly. When there's a central server to help it's even quicker and most of the time will just work.
(sometimes it's not possible to keep the same port when source-natting -- with two devices from 192.168.0.1:9000 -> 1.1.1.1:53 and 192.168.0.2:9000 -> 1.1.1.1:53, the second will have to have a mapping to non-:9000 source IP, but in my experience, Cisco, Fortigate and Mikrotik (thus linux) all support the "only change if needed" option)