This is not a redesign. He's removed ads and put his product in place of them. It hardly qualifies as a redesign at all - some of the after photos are exactly the same as the before photos above the fold.
The goal was to visually represent what Yahoo could look like with no traditional ads, hence the "redesign." Not sure I have the UX skillz to fully redesign Yahoo...the goal here was to make a case for native ads over banner ads, and how rolling out a native ad platform ala Facebook, Twitter, YouTube could fundamentally shift the Yahoo perception and internal culture of innovation.
Looks like all that the author did was remove a few ads. Does that really qualify as a "re-design"?
Agreed, the other yahoo pages are even less of a redesign. This is an embarrassing "article" even for TC.