It make sense if you think about it, but I would really not figure it out myself, that is true.
For anything large enough to matter, I think you'd want to deliver it as an application/json blob, anyway. Or use protobuf.
There, the language parsing penalty is paid during the compile step, and as far as a user is concerned the object approach is obviously faster than parsing from JSON.
This does leave me wandering - is the result here applicable to other scripting languages too? The argument in the article would seem to apply in the general case, but perhaps other languages have some particularities that change the result.