That passage is trying to emulate Robert Bringhurst's tone in his Elements of Typographic Style. See for yourself:

    One of the principles of durable typography is 
    always legibility; another is something more 
    than legibility: some earned or unearned interest 
    that gives its living energy to the page. It 
    takes various forms and goes by various names, 
    including serenity, liveliness, laughter, grace 
    and joy.

I am a typography geek myself and, while I was enticed by Bringhurst's prose when I first read it, I can't stand every blog post about typography trying so hard to sound like him.

First, as someone already pointed out, people are just rehashing his advice without adapting their essence to our media, the web. Second, people babble about typography for the sake of typography, forgetting that in the real world it's just a tool. As such, I leave another remark from Bringhurst:

    [The] satisfactions of [typography] come from 
    elucidating, and perhaps enobling the text, not 
    from deluding the unwary reader by applying 
    scents, paints and iron stays to empty prose.