Which kind of defeats the purpose of the original article.

I think it does the opposite, The author wanted to send a structured document without presentation, with your tool of liking (I used Firefox's reader view) you can read comfortably without compromising the content of the article or it's features.

edit: I could have used curl, an html processor and a pager like less or more

I'm pretty sure the author is against using special tools to read static text. That's his whole point, that people don't need browsers/readers or any fancy app to read static text!