I'd tend to disagree: I think fundamental language design is very important. Optimizations after the language tree has been built are an entirely different concept. Important nonetheless, but different to perhaps what the author is trying to achieve.

Personally, I think he is going about teaching it in a non-trivial manner making such things as you mentioned above more complex than they perhaps need to be. But, perhaps that's just how I've been taught how to write compilers... fundamentals often are the hardest to "un-learn".