(* did not read the article yet)
I had Curtis pitch urbit to me in the very early days and I can assure you that he did not intend it to be a prank. He was deadly serious about it. I think his true motives were much darker. I think he wanted to start a cult following the model of L. Ron Hubbard. And I think he succeeded.
As someone who has never met Curtis but has been initiated into both the cult of urbit and the cult of lisp, I've sometimes wondered how familiar he was the works of the latter, as you can often see some familiar things when you squint, but it's covered up with strange materials, quite possibly of alien origins.
There is very rarely any externally visible lock-in. That's not how cults work. Cults work by building a community of people who perceive non-members as the enemy. Urbit builds that community by enticing geeks with the promise of something new and interesting and then keeps them in by leveraging the sunk-cost fallacy (people don't like to admit that all the effort they put into learning Hoon was a waste of time) and all the derision that comes from the outside from people who "don't get it".
Where you see nefarious intentions I see someone pursuing their own aesthetics, something that is very admirable and that I think more systems engineers should do. It's obviously not your aesthetic. It's not even really my aesthetic. It's Curtis's. But isn't "radically different from anything that has gone before" just a roundabout way of saying "cool?"
As far as the "cult" goes, I am reminded of that part in Jodorowsky's Dune where he's all "I am looking for my holy warriors!" For any system, whether technological, religious or philosophical to remain living and breathing, it needs its adherents and believers, and I see neither bad intentions nor bad outcomes here. Maybe that's just what happens when you are deep enough in the cult. But the cult is... calm. Cozy, even.
Is that so bad?