"Lying" is not supported by the evidence. In the context of bot traffic on the web, looking at only GETs for HTML is a reasonable approach. If you're counting all requests for all assets then a single page view of nytimes.com would count 100x as much as one for HN.

I would assume a lot of people running websites tend to think in pageviews, especially when dealing with bots because images and CSS files tend to be "cheap" static content but HTML requests are often dynamically generated.

It's also a single tweet that links to the data used to "disprove" it. Would be a weird way to lie.