I think the pixelart from his game in the article was at such a high pixelcount that it was in an uncanney valley. Low pixelcount and players roll with the style, but high enough pixelcount and it does not serve a purpose and would be better of highresed.
This is why with Sol I went with 384×240 even though I knew the engine could easily cope with much higher, because if I went with say 768×480, people wouldn't get it and demand 1920×1200 instead, at which point there's risk of struggling because it's a software renderer and also would lack all the niceties such as texture filtering (despite the fact 2D games have no excuse for it in this day and age).
Of course you should question the use of a software renderer in the first place, but remember I had to start development at a time when my video card was busted and the only other one available was an integrated S3 chip with 32MB of memory and OpenGL 1.2. I'd rather take the CPU which was 2.4GHz and therefore could push some good software rendering easily.