As far as pointless speculation goes, this serves to show how easily people can convince themselves they are seeing shapes in clouds. Speculation piled upon speculation - albeit dressed up with pretty (but irrelevant) math - leads us nowhere useful.

Also it's worth pointing out that we throw around terms like "free will" and "purpose" without any meaningful definition. Studies make it abundantly clear we aren't even conscious most of the time and belief in "free will" is merely one result of the stories our brains create post facto in order to enable us to imagine we weren't acting as automata.

So the very premise of the core concept summarized in this article is fallacious. There is also zero logical justification for the "and so the time traveler becomes patient zero instead!" line of argument. All in all, an insubstantial thesis.