I can understand your hesitation. I think, however, that the author was simply suggesting using the headphones to check certain aspects that otherwise could be affected by a home studio's inferior acoustics and monitors (compared to a mastering studio). He certainly wasn't advocating doing a complete mastering job on headphones.
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But what good can listening on headphones be with all those defects? For starters, if your headphones go deeper than your speakers, they will allow you to check the tonal balance in the low end. Headphones will certainly not render as faithfully the energy of the lows, but when it comes to EQing, their use in this frequency range seems pertinent, considering that low frequencies are barely altered by your body acting as a natural filter.
Headphones also allow you to verify the quality of your fades in a more clinical way, as well as the impact of dithering, by increasing the volume a bit.