Given the "(hi Julia!)" immediately after the strace shenanigans, I interpreted this as a third-party hint; the author most likely had not used strace before.

The author is both an example of and an example for how we can get caught in "bubbles" of tools/things we know and use and don't, and blog posts like this are great for discovery (I didn't know about git invoking a binary in the path like his "git re-edit", for example, until today).