Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:
The original author is in error adding baking soda (bicarbonate), and indicating it will help rise. For leavening, you require acid for the sodium bicarbonate to react with. The original base recipe has no significant acid ingredients; even the modified version you used has only a trivial amount of acid from the molasses in the brown sugar. Therefore, the only effect of the baking soda is to increase the pH of the dough, which will encourage browning. However, as the cookies are full of sugar, encouraging browning is not generally a problem. The creaming method creates bubbles in the solid phase butter, and encourages rising and a more cake-like result, especially when paired with an...
Full answer by SAJ14SAJ: https://cooking.stackexchange.com/a/36665 (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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