The arguments are pretty broad, and it does seem the author worked back from a conclusion toward proof which in statistics doesn't work.
Being interested in decentralized currency and being a libertarian are essentially a Venn diagram that's a perfect circle. There were numerous other examples where the author would have concluded the average late 90s Slashdotter created Bitcoin because that was just your average neckbeard from the era, nothing unique to Satoshi. I was ready to just write off the whole article based on this extremely flimsy correlation.
The writing analysis comes down to a fundamental flaw. They chose a number of idiosyncrasies and then judged all candidates on those idiosyncrasies using the AI. But we don't know that those are the only idiosyncrasies of writing. Maybe only 1 author wrote both "email" and "e-mail" but maybe 1 other author only commonly misused "analogy" vs "metaphor" but since that person wasn't Back, they were ignored.
However , that all being said in defense of sloppy research. I can say with 100% confidence that a Giant Fucking Nerd that spends months, years and endless nights on a message board or mailing list don't usually just disappear. They especially don't just disappear at the exact moment that their biggest passion project suddenly finally heats up and gets popular. They got him dead to rights it's him. I need no more convinced.
If I'm a giant fucking e-currency nerd, I've created my own proof of work currency in the past (one of only a handful of people) and discussed/debated/thought about e-currencies like mine... and then suddenly someone finally actually starts on a viable implementation that's actually attracting a lot of attention... I would need welfare checks to make sure I wasn't dead because I would be following it so obsessively. Black even mentions that this happened while he was writing his dissertation with PGP... and he didn't even contribute to PGP. But we're supposed to believe that something as important (or more) that aligns with your politics and builds on your own work--going so far as to cite it as an inspiration... just isn't interesting enough for you to bother discussing?! Yeah lol no.