Notably, from a teaching "Unix tools 101" perspective, the difference is super unimportant. If the author's goal is to get students to open a terminal for the first time in their lives (on their Windows laptops!) and type some ls commands and maybe pipe stuff into sed once or twice, they can learn this on a BSD and apply it in any Linux (or the reverse) just fine.

I think the author means it literally. His goal is to teach students some Linux basics, and his method is to put a BSD into their Windows. It's kinda nuts, but you gotta agree it's kinda "mad genuis" nuts.