And "a11y" is the most obscure -- dare I say... inaccessible -- fucking abbreviation of "accessibility". For years I only saw them in passing and assumed both these things were like, quirkily-named Javascript frameworks or niche standards documents or something, despite knowing quite well the concepts they actually refer to.
I recently started watching this, but I think I have similar feelings to you, because once it went out to the wasteland I started getting less enthused and stopped watching after a few episodes. I've been meaning to get back to it and see it through -- although it sounds like you're not particularly rosy on it, hearing there's a "game show episode" makes me think I need to at least see what that's about.
I do really like the soundtrack; New Pulse in particular has a quintessentially cyberpunk feel for me.
No mention of how it compares to existing spatial indexing methods such as R[*]-trees. That was my first thought reading the article, but they only give a comparison to naïve NxM testing. I assume this method is still an improvement in the presence of sharding, but doubt it's the 400× quoted.
My assumption for the key icon was something to do with PINs/passkeys, which kind of reinforces OP's point.