I feel like a lot of what he attributes to malice or obfuscation is rather his unfamiliarity with the technical side of things.

Mapping numbers to non-sequential glyphs is exactly what happens in PDF, and PostScript before it. So is text positioning by Cartesian coordinates rather than in reading order.

Ligatures and multiple font variations have been around since fonts existed. Fonts that render incorrectly unless you use them in one specific way are legion (turns out font designers often have very little technical understanding, or just don’t care).

The only thing that sounds like obfuscation to me is changing the font encoding on every call. And if that is indeed its purpose, it’s a very poor attempt.