I totally agree. This looks like a pretty new startup too. I would be livid if my team had spent so much time on this instead of building capabilities to get the startup traction.
It looks like they wanted a reason to make a shiny blog post to get attention for their startup. Judging by the fact its on the front page of HN and we are all commenting on it, looks like they succeeded.
Yeah, the code is easy but navel-gazing and agonizing over the prettiest way to replace a long jumble of dash-separated lowercase characters with a slightly shorter jumble of dash-separated uppercase characters is an insane thing to spend any time on at all. Convince me this has any commercial value and isn't just bikeshedding.
This is just what it looks like to care about the details, though certainly a more trivial case than most.
The resistance to it is part of why most engineer-types like HNers can't build UX. They think it's all agonizing and navel-gazing, so they don't deliberate over anything. And they don't practice it, so when they see someone making deliberate UX decisions, even trivial ones, they think it must have taken a lot of time.
Good UX comes from a chain of trivial-looking decisions in isolation and a culture of caring about it.
Not trying to be mean, but the fact that they spend that much time on ids is an indication that the team could have misplaced priorities in other regards as well.