Finally I found the missing link to the second project, which I thought was gone for good, and updated the description. Thank you for your feedback. I did not expect it would be still interesting in 2022.
So, there existed at least two successful implementations that I know.

1. img2cd by [argon]. I think it was the first ever implementation of this technique. Not sure when it was accomplished, but given that the earliest comments under Instructables post were made 16 years ago, I assume 2006.

2. CD PAINT by [unDEFER]. My track generating code is mostly based on their implementation. Unfortunately there never existed English documentation, but the code is freely available. Not sure about exact date, but timestamps of the source code files vary from 2005 to 2008. So it might have been the first implementation too. :)

Anyway, it's interesting that two people almost simultaneously achieved it.

What makes the second implementation interesting is that they managed to guess geometry for several compact discs. I've tested two of them, and they mostly worked. Not for all compact discs though. Sometimes some manual tuning was needed.

In fact they even created a calibrating tool which is called defcdparams. The idea was to generate tracks with parameters that vary from center to rim and look for areas where the image was distinctive.