The author's usage of "meta" doesn't match up with how I've seen it used elsewhere. He refers to the "metagame" when really he's just talking about the game itself.
Vectors with different orientation but the same magnitude are the same vector (the zero vector.) Observe that if you add a zero magnitude vector and a unit vector, the result is just the same unit vector. It follows that the normalization scheme you described can't be a function on vectors (since you can "normalize" two equal vectors but get two different results.)