It's all true!
He says has 112' of baseboard cut up into 2 zones, so at least one of those zones is going to be pretty damned stubby for 85K of output, so if he is averaging better than 3 minutes of burn out of it I'd be surprised.
Which is why piggybacking the basement onto the first-floor zone by whatever means necessary is a marginal improvement, and a 20' stick by itself takes yet another step down the efficiency scale.
Definitely a candidate for a retrofit heat-purge control. If he can combine the basement & first floor with reasonable temperature balance and heat-purge the boiler at the beginning/end of calls for heat it'll cut down the number of cycles, lengthen the average burn, and crawl at least a bit out of the efficiency hole it's in.
At 85,000BTU/hr it's delivering about 200% of the actual 99% outside design heat load for the average MA house (according to utility site surveys) and about 300% the heat load of post-1980 2x6/R19 houses in MA. With the info at hand it's hard to say for sure what the whole house heat load is, but it isn't likely to be anywhere near 85,000 BTU/hr. He could probably heat his place just fine at 140F AWT, a temp at which the 112' of fin-tube is putting out ~35-36,000BTU/hr., and a boiler that delivers 40-50K would still have plenty of margin. But even a 40K output boiler will short-cycle on a 16-20' baseboard zone, yet would operate just fine on a 50' zone. Whatever he replaces it with should be right-sized for the heat load, but sizing the radiation on a new zone so that it will always short-cycle even with a right-sized boiler seems short-sighted.
A 20 year old short-cycling boiler is very likely to be replaced in under a decade. A $200 heat purge controller will likely pay off within 2 years. Spending the "extra" couple hundred in additional baseboard to ensure the next boiler doesn't get short-cycled seems "worth it" to me. YMMV.