This is a pretty on point description of him. He goes to great lengths to describe things and hash out ideas. In an autistic sort of way it's interesting but certainly not for everyone. It makes a lot of sense when you consider he was a PNW early internet tech dude. Quoting from wikipedia:

"Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, John Carmack, and Peter Thiel are all fans of his work."

As for the outrageously competent female characters, yeah, they are there but written in a different cultural climate than today. It wasn't done out of wokeness. A fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy writers around his age love to make characters like that. My guess is they all grew up reading Robert Heinlein, who had many "strong woman characters." That, and Heavy Metal magazine.

In the same story involving underwater orgies (The Diamond Age), he writes

"while people were not genetically different, they were culturally as different as they could possibly be, and that some cultures were simply better than others. This was not a subjective value judgment, merely an observation that some cultures thrived and expanded while others failed. It was a view implicitly shared by nearly everyone but, in those days, never voiced.

And that idea is a central theme of the book. Something you "can't" really say today.

In Cryptonomicon, published in 1999, one of the main characters has a professional academic girlfriend who writes a paper about "bearded white men" being horrible people and the root of all evil. Just seeing the term "white men" in the title tells the character that it's mostly bullshit.

I have no idea what he's up to today, and he could be some woke jackass now, but many of thoughts from then weren't woke at the time. They were what passed for progressive.

Did his, and other digital libertarians' like himself, thoughts pave the road to the shit going on today? Probably.