Well, the author says "trying to get back" (emphasis mine), which makes me think that there is some prior experience, it's not "has only started." The article also says:

  > Over a couple of years, I have managed to configure Emacs with most basic modern shortcuts that work in most other applications post the 1990’s (small things like Cmd+S to save, Ctrl+Tab to switch buffers etc.)

which, on the other hand, sounds a bit weird to me. It states that there are years of experience with Emacs, but it wouldn't take years to configure small things like Ctrl+Tab. These are things people use very frequently, so I would imagine one would configure it within the first month, or even the first week, of using Emacs to reduce friction.