What you're seeing here is someone trying to pump his ego by shitting on other things and show off to impress you with how uber technical he is-- not the first or the last one of those we'll see.
What you're seeing here is someone trying to defend obvious bad design choices.
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--i instead of ++i
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Fix your silly shit instead of keep talking about it.
As someone who has 30 years of experience plus a BS in CS and CE, and an MS in CS (from top 10 US CS/CE programs), this kind of language isn't a way to (a) make your point, and (b) get anyone to listen to you with any degree of respect.
In open source projects, if you have something like your --i and ++i change, open a pull request or at minimum link to the specific code you are talking about. Most well written, non-student compilers will handle cases like that and there will be no different between things like ++i and i++ and the code generated except perhaps in a class that obfuscates the operation in some extremely obscure way. But, as I said, if it is that easy, please point out what you are talking about.