Right, the key distinction being that in your scenario, the title change is entirely voluntary, and even beneficial from the perspective of the technical co-fou

Right, the key distinction being that in your scenario, the title change is entirely voluntary, and even beneficial from the perspective of the technical co-founder, because he wants to continue working on the codebase rather than having his time taken up by all the politician duties that C*O roles entail. I think in the OP, it seemed like more of a "you shouldn't let your first developer be the CTO because you want to be able to hire someone more experienced above him when your startup gets big enough to attract real rockstar talent" type of angle. Which, as you pointed out, is repulsive.