The author here is very highly respected in this community and already made his big bucks with other projects. If he says that he found something cool and then uses an affiliate link, it's a 99.9% chance that there's nothing more too it.
Searching, finding, and reporting in this style are common place for him.
Of course, I've been reading Jeff's posts for some time and know his creds. My question was not really very specific to him and this post of his, but just this time I caught myself mid-thought wanting to check whether the link is an affiliate link. For another author, I might not have been surprised, but I was in this case.
Mentioning that a link is an affiliate link (as cwd71 wrote) would be enough for me to put more trust in an author.
Searching, finding, and reporting in this style are common place for him.