Regardless of who Nakamoto actually was, it does appear that Finney and Szabo played a similar role that Sokal did in this story; getting support from high-rep folks was essential to getting Bitcoin off the ground.
Bitcoin had a few things going for it - the whitepaper is concise and well-explained, in perfect academic prose and typeset in LaTEX, which lends it an air of credibility. It came with an implementation, so hackers could experiment with it immediately, plus it sort of has implicit libertarian anti-government undertones, both of which encouraged follow-on blog posts.
Once the ball got rolling, another kind of heuristic took over - the money heuristic. People put money into the thing, which made other people go "oh look at how much money they put in, this is a real serious investment thing!" and put in their money, in a sick feedback loop that continues to this day...