Besides that it's also a personal story "I've been working on a competitor for a while and this is weirdly nicely timed".

A few months ago burtonator was under almost every article advertising his project ("Javascript? During the development of Polar Bookshelf (getpolarized.io) I have used Javascript!"), which I personally found a lot more annoying.

In the sea of close to 100% of pointless ads you quickly forget that they are actually supposed to make you aware of something you want. For many people in this thread that has probably succeeded.