The text read to me like it was, first and foremost, a translation from Russian. It wasn't the names that gave it away to me. It was the text itself. Even in English, it had unmistakable Russianness all over it. I switched the blog language to Russian. Didn't feel like an LLM. Felt rather like written by someone who had read a lot of Viktor Pelevin or maybe Leonid Kaganov.
Oh! I mean that could be a good explanation. Written in another language and then translated over via LLM.
I'm pretty sure it was. The wordplay on the Russian “пока” meaning both "goodbye" and "for now" (as in "not yet") is key here