I think the point is that we are given no real idea at all, not even some ballpark figures, about how much actual money actually needs to be spent in order to run Gas Town. The original article had some handwavy stuff about how it cost An Awful Lot, but no actual numbers.

Cost per line of code is not an amazing metric, but at least it's an attempt to come up with a figure.

(I would also be interested to find out how much it costs to run...)