I think that this wording relies on carefully interpreting "before halting". A TM which runs forever can run more than 47 million steps, but it does not run more than 47 million steps steps before halting, since it never halts.
I have changed the wording on the website in order to make it hopefully more straightforward:
"This conjecture says that if a 5-state Turing machine runs for more than 47,176,870 steps without halting then it will never halt (starting from all-0 memory tape)."
