How is anyone surprised? It is the grave you, the liberal tech people, have made. You can dig up threads here about Confederate Flags and how the people waving them (or not-burning the flags) need to be pushed into wood chipper.
Suspect the outrage of this thread is largely performative too.
While both are personal servers, I think Urbit is (and can be) a lot more friendly to average person than telling Average Joe to setup a vm in digitalocean and then through some magic make it communicate with your friends.
It wants to be secure personal server that anyone and their mother can setup and use. I have hard time understanding how people have hard time understanding this. It's not that "complex" guys.