Perhaps this comes down to having more context on Scott Aaronson's work and writing, but this section to me came off as humorous front matter, not some attempt

Perhaps this comes down to having more context on Scott Aaronson's work and writing, but this section to me came off as humorous front matter, not some attempt to precisely characterize the history of computer science. See the front matter of his book (Quantum Computing Since Democritus) for more context on this. On the actual meat of the post, Scott Aaronson is a definite authority figure (among others) on these topics especially as they relate to computing.