Whether those particular hands are examples of great poker doesn’t really matter because poker isn’t really about any single hand, but performance over many hands. In both cases, Brunson outlasted the competition and whittled away his opponents’ stacks until he had them against the ropes and increased the odds that they would make a desperate move. Those are examples of great poker playing.
Additionally with two pair heads up you need to get it in, the stuff about making reads gives amateur players the license to go nuts because they feel like it, again +EV. Dolly knew the odds better than almost anyone for a very long time, objectively we've learned a lot about poker in the last few years, and it's not fair to judge his play vs today's standards.
Is this outdated in general? From the talk below about GTO-and-heads-up is the assumption that it'd be dangerous now to assume anyone who's still in at that point doesn't have something better than you?
Situations like this are akin to an "I cut, you choose" situation. Hypothetically, you want to size your bet such that all possible responses lead to the same expected negative EV for the opponent and positive for you, with a layer of fuzziness so that your bet size doesn't always give away what you hold. That's what is meant by non-exploitable game strategy. Doyle's original advantage was knowing that bet sizing and fuzziness more precisely than anyone else, from a combination of intuition and calculation, and also in reading the opponent's propensity to inaccurately calculate and take advantage of that too. What's changed in the last few years is that now everyone and their bots know the proper calculations as Doyle always did - and they're also good at reading your bet sizing to correctly guess that you have the two pair.
Your description is still right for a single situation: with a stack advantage, yes you want to apply pressure. What's changed is the aggregation over many such situations, where your opponents have two pair just as often and play it just as well as you do.
The article says he wore his opponent down little by little -- and then won a big hand. So there's that -- accruing that big lead in the first place. (Which happens in both stories)
And then at that point the logic is different -- Brunson can effectively end the game and win the tournament if he wins the next hand. Even if your odds are 50-50, since you've got more money to gamble with than your opponent, it's probably worth it to take that shot.
Also, in this story he has two pairs. The odds of your opponent having two pairs on any given hand are just 4.7539%. (And the odds of it being higher than a pair of 10s is much lower than 2%). So betting high was the right move -- despite the fact that his opponent, by an incredibly unlikely fluke, seemed to have a better hand with one card left to flip. (Which is sort of meaningless, because the fifth card counts.)
But throughout the article, it also shows Brunson following a long-standing poker principle: playing the man and not the cards. ("Brunson knew that Alto tended to get impatient after losing big.") Even getting your opponent to risk all their chips is a challenge in poker -- but Brunson knew he could make that happen. (And knew exactly how...)
I think the larger point is he won the championship two years in a row. You just don't do that without tremendous skill. But even if that doesn't convince you of poker-playing greatness: it's still a tremendous story -- that he won both championships with essentially the same crappy 10-2 hand.
"To this day, the ten-deuce is known as the 'Doyle Brunson.'"
He pushed enough chips into the middle to force Alto to go all in with the rest of his stack. Alto called. “What’ve you got?” Brunson asked. Alto flipped over an ace and a jack, giving him the stronger two-pair hand. Brunson showed his ten-deuce and said, “You’ve got me beat.” The dealer flipped the card. Ten of diamonds. Brunson had won the Main Event.
The next year: Brunson had been working his opponent, Gary “Bones” Berland, and figured he had him on the ropes. He started with the same exact hand: ten-deuce. The communal cards gave Brunson two pair, and he bet before the dealer turned over the “river.” Berland went all in. The final card showed a ten, giving Brunson a full house and making the back-to-back champion a bona fide poker superstar.