I know that, the point is that this kind of stuff needs some thought, it's not so simple as "HTHTHTHT" = "HT five times". The article kind of glosses over that.
In the context of the analogy, it's probably better to read it as saving time to human-parse rather than the space required to send. (And it definitely takes less time to verbally state, even if the sentence is clearly longer; caching) The general idea is the same through; compression by describing patterns rather than explicitly stating the event
