For you.

I can see this being possible non-TAS, given that there's speedrunners who have gotten the item-swap credit glitches on real hardware now (through a hell of a lot of practice), although as Wander pointed out, there's a rerecord count, which means it's at least doing heavy save-state abuse which some consider to be TAS.

Given that he's using save states, I can also see this being possible on the first try (or, more accurately, on the 78160th try).

IZ is the only person I can find who's even claiming it's not TAS. I don't see any claims from the maker or anyone else that it's not.

My bad.. I sort of assumed that TAS was just a robot and not a real person playing it.. I've never been super clear on what it meant. By definition this is totes TAS.

Any run that utilizes software or hardware features beyond those already present in the original game, or that are necessary for recording, counts as TAS. This includes the use of save states when the game is played via emulator.

Ya I figured that out.. I remember one of the first videos I downloaded was off this BBS and it was like "holyshit dude just beat SMB3 in 10 minutes" or something only to find out later that it was just a bot. Question though, it seems like every game autosaves these days, so if you're doing a speedrun that might require a few deaths along the way to manipulate the game and auto-respawn at the savepoint, does that count as non-TAS?

If the game itself is autosaving, you're fine. TAS is only invoked when you use an external tool to do something that the base game wouldn't allow.