Honestly, I think it's just something you either like or don't. If all you were trying to do was understand SSA, I agree this blog post is probably inefficient at that particular task, but often blog posts are entertainment as much as education, so meandering through a bunch of different things along the way is part of the deal. Personally I thought there were a lot of pretty interesting insights that I haven't seen a lot of discussion about in other places, though I will admit I mostly learned about SSA from Wikipedia and from people yelling about compilers online.