As the guy who wrote the article, I agree with your point on the magic URL — in an ideal world it wouldn’t be like this. However, it is now too late. /favicon.ico has been the de facto standard for a long time and the HTML spec explicitly mentioning doesn’t really make much of a difference — it is really just standardizing what is already generally supported.

It’s time we stop complaining and start embracing this part of the URL layout as if it was robots.txt we’re talking about.