> I certainly hope not. Not unless it is deterministic and much much higher quality.

You're not comparing fairly. The author is intentionally using low-res images to illustrate how the compression works. You should compare these to, say, a JPEG compression at the same resolution and same bitrate. I think you'll find that this technique is quite an improvement to the compressions you already know and love.

JPEG has the great advantage that all JPEG artifacts look like JPEG artifacts. Newer codecs create artifacts that can be mistaken for part of the original image. That's a heavy price to pay for improved compression efficiency.