Others, please chime in, I want to take a sort of poll here:

I usually grimace at "GPT smell". The lines you quoted stood out to me as well, but I interpreted them as "early career blogger smell". It's similar, but it didn't come off as AI. I think because it avoided grandiose words, and because it reused the exact same phrase format (like a human tic) rather than randomly sampling the format category (like an AI). This is what human text looks like when it's coming from someone who is earnestly trying to have a punchy, intentional writing style, but who has not yet developed an editor's eye (or asked others to proofread), which would help smooth out behaviors that seem additive in isolation but amateur in aggregate.

Did others share the impression that it's a human doing the same classic tricks that AI is trained to copy, or does anything in this category immediately betray AI usage?

This post felt AI-touched to me, but the usage falls on a spectrum. You can write the whole post yourself, have an LLM write the whole post, or - what I suspect is the case here - have the LLM "polish" your first draft.

Many weaker or non-native writers might use AI for that "editor's eye" without realizing that they are being driven to sound identical to every other blog post these days. And while I'm certainly growing tired of constantly reading the same LLM style, it's hard to fault someone for wanting to polish what they publish.