If it’s a joke, the website is way too committed to the bit. They appear to also have less ridiculous articles with no obvious signs of satire, host Sunday and Friday service, sell books etc. The “New Month” is probably just something to fill their WordPress template’s calendar widget that they never figured out how to delete.
You are right, QR codes are very easy to decode if you have them raw, even the C64 should do it in a few seconds, maybe a minute for one of those 22 giant ones. The hard part is image processing when decoding a camera picture - and that can be done on the C64 too if it has enough time and some external memory (or disks for virtual memory). People have even emulated a 32-bit RISC processor on the poor thing, and made it boot Linux.