I agree. It is very easy to judge it harshly in retrospect. I find the comments about heat output especially strange. Perhaps they are forgetting some of the hotblooded pentium 4s of the day.
To me it read like an affectionate piece, not a harsh critique.
That case was a beauty.
I find it incredible how indifferent and uneducated I was back then, about how much power it uses and what the consequences are on a larger scale. I remember keeping it powerd on 24/7 (of course with periods in which it slept). Nowadays I am (hyper)aware of the power consumption of pretty much every device in the house.