Out of curiosity, who do you worry is "pretending this is the path to a successful web business?" Because the author certainly isn't doing so.

If you scroll down just a few paragraphs from the sentence fragment you quoted, the author says:

> "My main goal for the next six months of Tiny Projects is to learn how to get better at making money on the internet from my projects.

A Product Hunt launch can easily get you a spike in traffic, but afterwards I really don't know what I'm doing. There's this whole other level afterwards called "sales & marketing" that I want to master."

The author is extremely explicit throughout the piece that these are not built to become large businesses—hence the constant use modifiers like "tiny" and "micro." He also makes it clear that he treats this as a training routine for getting better at idea generation, shipping products, etc.