This is all true to my understanding as well. Also they decide church by church (mostly) what rules to follow, so there isn't some Amish pope decreeing things they all have to do to stay Amish.

Some examples I've been told/seen:

• use of washing machines was allowed because it saved hours of drudge labor, but they were all in one communal location so that everyone still had to get together to use them. Dryers were not allowed

• one telephone was allowed in the community for mostly emergency use, but individuals weren't allowed to have phones in their houses because it was feared they would spend their time talking in isolation instead of gathering as a community

• pneumatic/air powered tools were allowed, but not electric or gas powered. No idea how they were running their compressors though

• one community didn't have enough water rights to farm all their fields for like 3 years in a row, so when the power company approached them to build a small solar farm they jumped at the chance to gain some use from the field they weren't likely going to be able to farm any time soon. The community had no electricity other than a street light at the end of their drive where it met the paved road. It was kind of funny watching them drive horse and buggy around a solar farm right next to their big old timey barn

• forbidding the consumption of tobacco (and lots of other vices) but they grew it to sell outside of their community as a cash crop

I think the comparison to the ultra orthodox is pretty spot on, I met a guy that said he would ride in a car but only if someone else opened the door for him. He also had a neighbor that would come over and turn on his electric lights when he needed, but he felt ok turning them off again without intervention.

Different sect but a fun Mennonite story: I saw a big family of Mennonites all dressed up in an airport terminal waiting on a flight to Las Vegas. The oldest man was eating a corn dog

choosing ways that inconvenience and disrupt daily life as markers of their culture and expressions of their faith,

I thought it was more like, they're just super conservative (as in cautious) about new tech and need to feel absolutely certain that it will actually make their lives better. Like, having a telephone somewhere nearby so you can call for help in emergencies is pretty thoroughly proven to be beneficial. Having a smartphone in your pocket so you can doomscroll Instagram all day is not.

They don't want to make their lives harder necessarily, they just want to make their lives fulfilling. They may have very different ideas of what that means than I do but I don't hate the idea. Especially since they all get a chance to see how we outsiders live and decide whether they want to stay. Ofc it's not easy to make the choice to leave everyone and everything they've ever known, there's definitely a coercive element to it, but it strikes me as way less coercive and abusive than something like Mormonism or whatever.