If the article was more about hidden opcodes or instruction set side effects, that's great. But if the key to shaving 8 bytes out of the routine was calling a 120-byte function that's free in the ROM, there's no real trick to 6502 programming being revealed.

It's the equivalent of a blog post titled "I wrote a web server in 3 lines of code!" and the author calls .start() in some imported framework that contains 250,000 lines of code.