I don't think this is a fair critique.
The author of the post uses standard terminology like entropy coding and arithmetic coding, and cited a paper "in 2023, Google DeepMind released a paper arguing that language modeling and compression are two views of the same thing" which discusses it further.
This blog post is great. Well explained, and clearly took a lot of effort.
I don't interpret it as them claiming to have to discovered it independently.
Citing 2023 makes it seem like this is newer than it is. Compression, prediction and intelligence have long been known to be deeply connected.