Besides, this was a personal project, probably created without the intention of eventually open sourcing it. If he only ever intended to use MySQL, and portability across RDBMS systems wasn't a goal, then it's fine as it is.
Seriously though I agree with your point about PDO. Perhaps the down-vote was due to the comment about de-engineering and apparently making fun of 10k LOC?
I took a look at the app and it's got a huge amount of features. 10k is not really that much code for a "enterprise" app I suppose you could call it. The OP probably is just trying to express the amount of labor that went into the app. Unfortunately other developers may judge your LOC as either a positive or negative, so it's probably best to avoid mentioning it (unless you've written an app in an unbelievably low number of lines).