Oh, absolutely it uses shortcuts. And hacks, and cheats, and some stuff that really shouldn't work but does! Without that hard work nothing would be possible at 1kb.
Why not grab the setup code from my Helix demo, and then at least you can compare the tricked out version with a fully featured version?
In OpenGL, if you work in the right coordinate space, it's easy to cater for the variety of screen widths, heights you get with the framework. ie. don't assume pixel sizes, assume the screen is (-1,-1) top left, to (+1,+1) bottom right, and let the projection matrix deal with the scaling.
Jim