Apparently there was a slip up about it on his drive to work podcast.
During his Unhinged podcast he talks about how they considered making Little Girl a "Basic Creature" but they "didn't have that technology yet."
In reality, when he's talking about this technology he means the ability to have any number of a card to begin with (first showed up in Mirrodin, meaning it hadn't gone to print yet when Unhinged was in design), it's not something he's been passionate about, it's not something new because we obviously have already seen it, it's not something that will excite anyone, it's not a design challenge so it doesn't fit the clue, and it doesn't date to before Maro became head designer. So... why is reddit talking about this again?
I believe this is a change from how Winter Orb currently works
Hallelujah!
First off, love this art -- the original owns obviously but this is a great reinvention, which until now has been online-exclusive in the MTGO Cube. Brian Snoddy is another one of those underappreciated classic artists, so this is a great fit.
Secondly, when they changed the tapped-artifacts rule, they originally errataed a few cards to include the turn-off since it was so fundamental to how they functioned, but then later in one of their purges of "functional errata" they got rid of them again. Cards that had been printed in the interim -- like Static Orb -- got to keep their latest text, but Winter Orb didn't see print again in that time period and so got it wiped out. This suggests that someone mercifully convinced them to re-revert to the errata text, and then print it in paper to make sure it sticks.