Need help understanding how this works.

It seems like it expands to fill all available space. How is it 10 times faster than A* then?

Also, a question about this step (in red)...

When we find the forced neighbour, why don't we place a node to the open set right near the forced neighbour and store how we arrived there from the previous step (EXPANSION_NORTHEAST_THEN_EAST) but instead place the node closer to the parent there, where we'll have to find the forced neighbour again? And how do we know not to expand to all directions again?