Redux does add complication. But it also cleanly solves a big problem. I've heard good things about mobx instead of redux in terms of reducing boilerplate/total lines of code. So that might be one thing to try if starting a new project today or refactoring.
The purposed solution in the blog is pretty bad. It only works if you have a few things being updated. It might work fine for the author's use case but it's a bad idea to assume it will work well for all use cases. If you want to go this route, please try Backbone.js and come back when you get sick of ghost event listeners (event listeners that didn't get unbound). Obviously, there are ways to work around those issues but it requires understanding them (both by you and any other devs who join the project -- some with less experience might have no idea about these gotchas).