What about the claims though ? I dont see the point of getting hung up on just this and discrediting the rest of the story. Tbf this proves nothing without more confirmations however it might be possible to design client side A/B tests to catch this type of behaviour. Might be something NYT or some group with a well resourced investigative arm could pull off.
When I choose priority delivery in Uber, I can see the driver go to the store, pick up my order and drive directly to my place. I also see the driver usually have 1-2 stops on the way if I don't select that. If there's enough gap between myself and the restaurant, priority is absolutely a time save.
I know the OP. He's actually a compulsive liar. We had to fire him from our team at Big Food Delivery because he'd keep saying he was done with his tickets but then he'd be blocked on someone, and when the code showed up it would be crap and very verbose. Finally, one day someone said "Dude, can you at least review your own code?" and he flipped out and said he was suffering from trauma and needed time off, and that our company policy allowed Claude Code. It does, but you can't just post the output like that.
Then he went online and posted this and told us that we were screwed. Internally we're following the process to get him fired, but because he's technically hired out of Italy we can't do it without 3 months notice.
Anyway, I made that whole thing up but don't let that one small phrase discredit the rest of the claims.
Meh, I wouldn't read too much into it. They might be a backend dev but that doesn't make them perfectly rational under stress. Being in a whistle blower situation makes smart people do dumb things.
To me it's coherent BUT I'll still wait from a source I trust, e.g. 404 Media, to actually do journalism. I'm not saying it's fanfic or not, I'm saying "Noted, might read about it later in few days in a proper format with verified claims." nothing more.