But in practice, this didn't happen, which is what TFA seems to be all about. So it's not incorrect to talk about software renderers (of the time) vs hardware accelerated graphics (of the time) and how they were used in practice (at the time). It's just cumbersome to write "at the time", and it's understood from context; at least I did. It also helps to look at the rest of the blog's articles and what the blog is about...

Sure, software rendering mostly used nearest neighbor, but it's not crisp because it's software rendering, which is what the article claims.