Help understanding structure behaviior in esp now example

I can't see how that code is supposed to work, the only way I can see it did in their test is down to luck.

I guess what they did is load the sender sketch, and then load the receiver sketch. Since both sketches use the same variables, the memory allocation is the same for both sketches. So when the receiver sketch de-references the String pointer, it will point to the memory that was initialized when the sender sketch was loaded.