And later he states "Unfortunately, you are wrong there. I will explicitly and publicly list parties that are allowed distribution in the license and allow for requesting distribution requests."
The "fine article" always contains the correct bits.
In that context he was talking about for future releases of the project, if the others in that thread forked the project right this minute, it would still be MIT.
Yes this is precisely the section I meant.
He later says he will relicense it so only specific projects can use his code. I think that would likely invalidate their own licenses, so I'm not sure how that would work.
Not retroactively. They can stay on the old version forever / maintain the new fork but any new code will be under the new license.