mjpeg is a normal, albeit very simple video stream. While you could certainly squeeze the counter in less bytes by using a more advanced codec with interframe coding, it would be overkill for this poc.
The point im trying to make is more that video streaming is a standard technique with off the shelf solution. The author presents MJPEG as some long lost solution to do this without js, but you can just as easily throw in a <video> tag without JS and call it a day. Except video tags arent as exciting.