Well yes, in the post you link Tim says exactly the same. He just sets up a "refresher" function that calls router.refresh() in an interval/timeout/on focus. There is no data loading from the client. Calling refresh will reload your component if the data changed server side (make sure you disable/invalidate cache). Alternatively, you could set up a server action that calls e.g. revalidateTag("preorder") ; this will both revalidate the server cache and send the updated data in one roundtrip.

I don’t get it.. why not make this a server component? There is no need for client data fetching. You can just call ‘refresh’ (or ‘revalidateTag’ from a server action) to reload the component.