I got the feeling from the thread that the author's perspective and framing is coming from having to help many people with their problems and likely misuses and misunderstandings of rust references, where your point of not having "paid enough attention to how the book introduces references" may be applicable to many of the people they've helped.
For me, while there isn't anything conceptually new in their framing, I found the emphasis and perspective helpful and affirming, in part because I hadn't got to the point of verbalising the "locks" metaphor as you say you probably did but instead was still thinking of it all as a set of constraints to work within and problems to avoid. Framing the situation in a more "active"/"positive" (as in posit) way where the emphasis is on what references "do" rather than just on what they "prevent" seems helpful to me, and that's the part that I feel like is missing from "The Book" or anything else I've read. It also feels like a better way of explaining why lifetime annotations become necessary (generally wondering which being how I ended up reading those threads)