The author of an article about Neo4j query planning explains how eagerness in Cypher, a declarative query language used by Neo4j, can lead to performance issues and memory consumption. The article uses a fairytale-like story about Santa Claus and his toy factory elves to illustrate the concept of eagerness, which is necessary in some cases but not others. The author explains how eagerness analysis has been improved in Neo4j version 5.19 to provide better maintainability, observability, and performance. The article provides examples of how to optimize eagerness in Cypher queries, including removing Eager operators, changing their placement, and using LP Eagerness. The author also discusses the importance of understanding query planning and execution plans to improve query performance and avoid common pitfalls like memory consumption.