Oh gosh. I think I was so focused on the reduction direction that I think I misread the premise of the comment -- it seems somehow my brain parsed "use SAT to solve Sudoku" as "solve SAT using Sudoku". That's why I was saying that reducing SAT to Sudoku would imply Sudoku is at least as hard as SAT. It indeed would if they had actually done that, but they did the opposite. Not sure how my wires got crossed when reading, but thanks!