I know the semantic compression post, and I don't think it makes a point for bottom-up design. I find top-down and bottom-up to be quite misleading anyway. Someone told me, they don't like to think of things at the "top" and the "bottom". It's data transformations, maybe more like "left to right".
If you design bottom-up, you end up with lots of artifacts you never needed (and likely still missing the ones you can make use of). If you design top-down, you end up with lots of code you don't need. (this is where semantic compression comes in, in my understanding).
I suspect that if you like to think bottom-up, maybe that's because you like it more at the bottom (you are a low-level type of guy, or like to make libraries). If you like to think top-down, maybe you like it more at the top.
I like the semantic compression term because it reduces the act of design to the essentials, without introducing fluff terms or opinions. I find myself doing this compression no matter what kind of code I'm writing.