A tangential question, not addressed by the article: why is "true" now implemented as a binary written in C?
As expected, the GNU version is comically large[1], but even the "suckless" version is a compiled binary[2].
I'd guess that nowadays "true" is usually a shell builtin. Are there circumstances where the actual /bin/true gets called and that the overhead of forking off a shell to run it (the empty shell script) is too much?
[1] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/coreutils.git/tree/src/tru...