I'm finding myself in a weird position now, because I disagree with a whole lot of things in the blog post (well, the parts I was willing to read anyways), but calling that variable static for the sake of persistence was correct.

The fact that you are questioning the use of the term shows that you are not familiar with the ISO C standard. What the author alludes to is static storage duration. And whether or not you use the "static" keyword in that declaration (also definition), the storage duration of the object remains "static". People mostly call those things "global variables", but the proper standardese is "static storage duration". In that sense, the author was right to use "static" for the lifetime of the object.

EDIT: if you drop "static" from that declaration, what changes is the linkage of the identifier (from internal to external).