Reimplementing Tor from Scratch for a Single-Hop Proxy

The main motivation of the author seems to be that Tor is slow, but you can significantly speed it up by manually choosing Tor nodes. For instance, if you pick your three fast nodes within a short distance of you location, then the speed is significantly higher then the default tor settings.

So the author doesn't want to cough up the money to buy a VPN but will instead write a custom Tor client that is intentionally weak on anonymity so they can run their own exit node on a VPS they bought. Why not setup Wireguard and use the VPS as a VPN? More power to them, seems like they learned some things and are happy with the results, I just don't get it though.