Maybe I didn’t, I’m just unable to! 
ahhhhh mystery!
So as much as I respect Graham, I think having the banner, credits, and version placed somewhere besides inline is perfectly fine. The request made by Graham/Inform was done when our sole user experience was a streaming text window. With the advent of web and other user experiences, something has to give to enable more usable and artistically inclined stories.
As long as there’s a simple way to view the the Credits and Version, I believe it should be author’s choice.
It is okay to disagree with people and most of our works are free and often open source. The artist has rights too.
I like this guy. 
I agree with David’s take on it. Things like software and serial numbers appearing can be intimidating to some, and alternatively, the author may or may not want the aesthetic effect (+ve spin) or slug (-ve spin) of the banner. I often move this material into a credits option which I explicitly make available at game start, but again, I also don’t begrudge people leaving them in VERSION, even if they don’t explicitly say, ‘type VERSION!’
On the other hand, I went out of my way back in Inform 6G60 (where it was really hard slog) to correctly credit immodest extension authors. Because to use customised extensions then, you typically had to change the author of the extension to yourself or a pseudonym if you wanted it to coexist with the vanilla version. And then the VERSION command listed the wrong info… so you’d go about manually trawling up all the info and dependencies and AUUUUGHGHH!!!..
Now that you can save customised extensions with each project in 6L38, all that arduousness has gone away.
On the topic of extensions and the modest, it does say in the Inform documentation:
[b]"A complete list, undiluted by modesty, can always be obtained using:
say “[the/-- complete list of extension credits]”[/b]
-Wade