No offence to the author, but they obviously have never developed a website with custom fonts and viewed it in Chrome before... I wrote about this issue in 2010:
http://ilikekillnerds.com/2010/12/a-solution-to-stop-font-fa... — Case in point. The company I work for who designed the new Myspace and we did some early HTML prototyping of the site designs and the sad reality is you need to use this font-smoothing fix or Chrome butchers the fonts. Go and inspect the Myspace website and you'll see this very fix is being used and you want to know why? Because it's required and works. As are many other sites that use this fix.
It's definitely a Chrome issue, this isn't just some property designers are playing with for the heck of it. Want to see another issue in another browser? Put light text on a dark background and view it in Firefox. Fonts like Helvetica Neue especially have the problem, but any chunky font will show extra faux bold. There is no fix for this in Firefox at present.