I'd speculate that it's not a dogwhistle, but rather a signifier of a constellation of ideological positions that are getting worse and worse under sharpening contradictions. For as long as I've been using the Web, I've been sympathetic to the idea that the less it's subject to the incentives of capitalism, the better for virtually everyone - same goes for software development. A crucial problem, of course, is that you can't just carve out a space to be exempt from a system of unparalleled expansion and extraction, so eventually you have to either acknowledge that capitalism itself is the problem with tech under capitalism, or you're forced to retreat into idealism.

You know Haiku OS? I've always thought it was neat. Unfortunately, here's a thread of Haiku users being so detached from reality that they're unironically calling mild restrictions on their LLM bickering "fascism" and "a gulag," complete with invocations of a "right of reply" and a user asserting that LLMs are the kind of AI that sci-fi promised.