Funny enough, I was just planning to email the author of this w/r/t some of my new maps:
For instance, look at the border between the upper left and lower left islands. In this picture, those two islands are only touching along a third of the border that they share on the sphere. If you look at the leftmost point of where they are touching in this picture, that's a vertex that would have only two hexagons.
Edit: Basically he hasn't actually tiled a sphere with regular hexagons (which is what the proof said was impossible. He has titled a flat projection of a sphere with regular hexagons, which would have to be morphed to irregular hexagons if tiling a sphere when the projection was reversed.
Not taking away from the tiling, which is quite interesting in itself.