Why is it still called SIMD-accelerated, if these are now just normal instructions. You just have to take a little bit more effort into restructuring your algorithms to make use of them.
If you do multiplication using mul instead of loop and add, is it acceleration too?
The article would then be "MUL-accelerated multiplication". Obviously any modern compiler should not require a developer to make that optimization.
What does "normal instructions" mean? I don't see (or missed) a heading with "Normal" in the ESP32 docs.
Edit: Or are you saying the instruction called out by the author is not SIMD?
Or perhaps you want to argue that everything is running "normal" instructions. Be it a hardware video decoder or a GPU.