Well the proper analogy would be that you write your programs in assembly. I think the more impressive thing here isn't the ray tracer, but the C (or was it C++?) to brainf** transpiler. That would be equivalent to you writing both C code and the C compiler. Pretty impressive, but depending on the complexity of the program not as impressive as writing whatever it is in assembly directly. A raytracer would be PAIN to write directly in brainf** - I think I'd want to use fixed precision everywhere rather than emulated floating point. (on second glance, it does look like the author of the article is also using fixed precision arithmetic, but confusing the label for the layout of the number with the type of number representation itself?)

Pretty much, though the interesting bit is clearly the abstractions and work involved. Writing 22MB of code doesn't sound very maintainable :)