To answer the author's question: because the crayon picker rules! It's genuinely useful.
The article covers this but I think it's worth saying again: this was a different era in software development. In 1995 "shipping" meant literally "shipping": they had to produce real inventory, and then get it out into a bunch of different distribution channels. A problematic Easter egg caught too late could ultimately require an actual physical recall.
Also, there was at least one scientific graphics package from the late 1980s (I used it under BSD4.3 on microvaxen[0]) that not only had a crayon-based color picker, but used it for a simple calibration mechanism, since you could just buy a cheap box of crayons and adjust the screen colors to match. So there was at least one contemporary existence proof of "Crayola probably isn't going to go after you for this".
[0] I've forgotten the name; the main thing I remember is that your window was dimensioned in 0.0-1.0 floating point, not pixels. Some searching suggests it might have been PHIGS or GKS... and turns up a Tugboat article about FoilTeX using crayola color names similarly in 1992, so it was a more popular hack than I realized at the time.
We used to have to physically fly out a technician to each of our customers office to install software updates and fixes. Those bugs were very expensive to patch!
The article covers this but I think it's worth saying again: this was a different era in software development. In 1995 "shipping" meant literally "shipping": they had to produce real inventory, and then get it out into a bunch of different distribution channels. A problematic Easter egg caught too late could ultimately require an actual physical recall.
It's not surprising people freaked out over it.