I think they should siply use four patches of BC1 (DXT1) texture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Texture_Compression It allows storing a full 8x8 pixel image in 32 Bytes (4 bits per RGB pixel).
That sounds inferior. From the article:
> ThumbHash: ThumbHash encodes a higher-resolution luminance channel, a lower-resolution color channel, and an optional alpha channel.
You want more bits in luminance. And you probably also don't want sRGB.