Is there a way to force a particular plan instead of letting the db decide? It's unfortunate the author needed to use a hack to trick the db into using the correct plan.
Other databases have optimizer hints for that, but apparently there’s resistance to adding hints into Postgres [1]. I find hints very useful (in Oracle world) for quickly working around some optimizer glitch (and figure out the long term solution later).
There actually is a “pg_hint_plan” [2] Postgres module that adds some hints to Postgres optimizer (but it’s not part of Postgres core as I understand):
[1] https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/OptimizerHintsDiscussion