Around the same time was the 64-bit requirement for app updates. This resulted in a dual-slice fat binary. Began being enforced in June 2015 I think, so about 2 years ago.
Here's to demystifying the internals of UITableView! Your tone seemed fine to me. Glad you geared it towards newer folks to iOS. I remember when I was first starting with iOS, one of the biggest questions I had on these things was "Why?". Luckily posts like this, and the treasure trove of Mike Ash's blog provide a clear understanding of both how the components in Cocoa work, and why they work that way.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Loved that blog post, and certainly enjoyed looking at R. Nystrom's implementation too: https://github.com/rnystrom/RNTableView.
UITableView is one of those components that we all spend so much time with that everyone has little tweaks they want to make. Implementations like these at least give us options to extend/tweak low level behavior should we need to. I also love it when they write thorough blog posts like these explaining explicitly their rationale and structure of the component.