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It's mentioned in the article.

I feel like the article is written from the perspective of an embedded software/hardware appliance developer, or the hobbyist equivalent.

It makes a lot of sense to talk about saving $100 on an RTC board if you only want a clock to for some one-off script you’re writing. Things can be as fiddly as you want in that case—e.g. load the program from disk to memory, then enable the clock using the little switch you built into it and let it tick while the disk is spun down.

Yeah, with just a XOR checksum this would be pretty dangerous even for reads. Of course, in those days you could probably sell someone a $50 FIFO buffer to work around the disk controller problems :)