I'm in two minds about this. That was my own first interpretation, for the same reasons as you. And you could well be right, in fact I'd say there's a 70% probability.

But the nature of iterated fractal functions is that they generate information, which is how we can get such elaborate pictures of ferns from such a small amount of starting information. When we squint at a pixelated image, we're deliberately trading off optical distortion in order to get a sense of the underlying pattern - it's not more accurate because we're inventing stuff, but it is giving us an answer to the question of 'what function would generate these shapes in a low-resolution picture?' and then going on to iterate that same function.

So while acknowledging the likelihood that you're right and I'm wrong, I'm not totally ready to come off this limb because I'm also thinking of what it was that made the resolution scaling of this technology so good - there was something more complex than mere interpolation going on. I'll have a look through the text again and think about it further.