"if you build it, they will come" and "terse readmes" work very well in problem domains that don't have a few compelling open source solutions. Fanciful READMEs and marketing matter a lot more in a competitive/saturated space.
the article points out that the only way your repo will get attention if theres nobody else in the problem space, or your lib is much simpler then the other tools, so i think it can be both efficient in terms of description and mildly attractive visually. Also i think "fanciful" is a bit misleading here. Sure they recommend an icon, and/or an animation. i dont think thats necessarily overkill for some projects
