Something can be ridiculous and also conceptually interesting / intelligent.

Gas Town was (transparently, directly from the author's writing) a veneer of visual/linguistic flair applied over a conceptually fascinating and well-thought-out attempt to prod gen 1 LLMs (with all their flaws) into infinite, zero-touch agentic loops.

That the author chose to do so with Mad Max-themed animals doesn't validate or invalidate the underlying concepts.

Personally, I'd rather that than some soulless OpenAI / Anthropic / Microsoft / Google / Meta corporate-scrubbed blob of beige, riskless design.

Especially when it was abundantly clear they realized the presentation choice was ridiculous, but the guts were the more important part.

And not for nothing, there's the 'We're not Kansas anymore' utility of the sufficiently bizarre, to cue people to avoid reusing the wrong prior expectations.

E.g. in Munder Difflin: 'Your LLMs are occasionally brilliant but generally stupid characters, not brilliant human analogs'