Is it? In the first paragraph the author clearly shows his ignorance of base64. When told that it "looks like base64 encoded JSON" he

    was incredulous but gave it a go, and it worked!!

TBC I was addressing the parents suggestion that the writer was incurious.

One blog post is hardly enough to just someone as ignorant but after quick look at the author's writing/coding/job history, I doubt he is that either.

I think it's fantastic that you can look at a string and feel it's base64 essence come through without a decoder. Thinking about it for a minute, I suspect I could train myself to do the same. If someone who already knew how to do it well wrote a how-to, I bet it would hit the front page and inspire many people, just like this article did.

I just don't get the urge to dump on the original author for sharing a new-to-him insight.

They were probably expecting base64 encoded binary data. Base64-encoded-binary-inside-Base64-encoded-JSON-inside-JSON is a really strange construction if you haven't encountered it before, because of how much space it's wasting playing a game of Russian nesting dolls.