It's partly name recognition and partly novelty. The 37signals approach is unusual, while most competent front-end developers are already aware of the principles in Souders' post.
Sounders post is 5% halfheartedly evangelizing (maybe not-so) common knowledge and 95% reiterating his point about the split between frontend/backend time on fulfilling a request.
After reading it I'm pretty sure it could eliminate all but the last graph and be just as valuable at 1/4 the length. That he did a rather comprehensive evaluation is commendable, but I think the post loses track of its main point in favor of sailing the sea of data that was collected.
Are we upvoting simply by name recognition?
http://stevesouders.com/about.php
He only wrote the book on high performance web sites...
http://www.amazon.com/High-Performance-Web-Sites-Essential/d...