It's an amazing rant, but he's still going off on tangents: what is worthwhile in life? And how horrible is Oracle? No really, let's just ROAST oracle. Wait that reminds us of Larry Ellison. He really is the worst, have you heard these stories?! Don't anthropmorphize him, he's a lawnmower!

If you look at the single slide that all of this is sparked by, you can see that these are just (amazing) rants. He's telling the story of Illumos, and that reminds him of the pure evil of Oracle and the meaning of life, and he keeps letting himself drift from the topic to savor those points over and over. He is very quirky, and thinks about things in very quirky ways, and he's just letting the whole audience enjoy that for a bit.

That's why this is such a great illustration of OP's point.

I'm looking at those tangents as part of the scope of the talk. When you're talking about someone's unique perspective of the history of some event, you want all those opinions and rants in there. If it was just a list of slides talking going from event to event, that'd be extremely boring.