It's often not worth the overhead to develop for small bits like `likes`. For small, 30-50ms requests they're not going to notice anything either way. A brief flash of an icon isn't useful.
In the article it describes reverting the state of the component if the action fails, asynchronously. IMO that’s much worse than briefly representing a progress state for a few ms.
Two things.
1. Likes are not a small detail of a social network app
2. If you're handling a failure state when the HTTP request comes back (like the author does), handling the success state is just an `else`