He likes the look of nearest neighbor texture sampling, not software rendering.

You can do nearest neighbor in hardware rendering and you can do bilinear in software rendering. Rendering mode and texture sampling are two totally different things.

Technically you're right, a gpu is just a bunch of ALU and FPU in a way, we just defer computation to a massive array of them so the cpu can do other things, what you do on these gpu cores is up to you.

That said, historically, software rendering meant non-accelerated passes that could be carried out by a cpu at decent enough FPS.

ps: some could also say that a FPU is not software rendering since early x86 didn't have it in the cpu.

The author likes the look of the tradeoff made due to the limitations CPU power imposed on the rendering model for real time 3D games 30 years ago.

Yeah you can hack configurations or create your own game to mimic this look.

If you read the post you will see it’s not only about the texture sampling, but also the color depth.

OP picked a good headline. You are fighting for semantics nobody cares about, and picking a more complicated synecdoche.