I really enjoyed your post and was surprised to see it not posted here. I guess now I can leave the comment I wasn't able to leave on lobste.rs :)
The format made for good lunchtime reading -- the care you put into making it easily readable shows. Are the illustrations actually hand-drawn? Looking forward to the next part(s) that you hinted at!
The illustrations are hand-drawn on my tablet, and then converted to SVG and touched up via an incredibly laborious and probably fairly unnecessary process.
Not the author, but when I want to make diagrams like this, I usually use tldraw! It has a nice nearly-hand-drawn feel that's casual and approachable for these kinds of sketches.