It definitely needed an editor to help them polish it up. It's funny though, I read it a year or two ago while I was in the middle of I Am A Strange Loop by Hofstadter and I'm positive the author of TiNAD had just read IAASL when they wrote it...People essentially being memes explained through loss of a partner, Prokofiev making a conspicuous appearance, and strange loopiness in general. It was weird, like the author and I had just read the same book.
As a fellow reader of IAASL I see what you mean. I think IAASL lost me at the end because it was repurposing terms like "soul" and "self" in ways that were no longer really philosophically robust, but I understood and appreciated it as effectively memorializing a lost partner, and gave clear expression to what it means to treat the things a person leaves behind, and the desire to preserve them, as a way of keeping your connection to them.
And it doesn't diminish how fantastic the rest of the book us up to that point. In the age of almost-AGI and renewed debates on consciousness we need the likes of Hofstadter more than ever.