The code from the article is at some point going to need to be abstracted probably. Unless it is 'done'. As they add much more to it and they will be in the exact situation you are talking about. That is a tough call sometimes when to just bash it out and move on or DRY it up. I personally would toss a comment in there for saying exactly as much. That is going to be a future mess (but not yet).

That whole article though I see as a total communication breakdown. Between the two devs and the manager. That the other dev just invoked 'management chain button' is not a good sign for a good working env. Also the new version did not ssem much better than the prev version. The trust of the developers is broken and the manager did not help and the dev who wrote the blog post now will be shy of doing things.