But--and this is crucial--the one about regexes is hilarious.

It also comes from a time in Internet culture when humor was appreciated instead of aggressively downvoted.

It's because the author put effort into it. Most (online) humour is lazy, low effort, regurgitated meme spam. See: Reddit. It should be downvoted and ideally never posted at all.

This is also the reason why I consider the lack of images in IRC a feature.