This doesn’t actually seem too crazy? There’s a bunch of social pressure to be employed and a lot of shame associated with unemployment, if you’re financially capable of paying a small fee to avoid that kind of embarassment it makes sense some would do it. And for all the weaknesses of capitalism, finding a money making niche and exploiting it isn’t one of them. In the west we had people doing the same shit with wework spaces. The fictitious tasks and staging a worker rebellion seems a little silly, and I suspect that’s exaggerated or misunderstood (But what do I know?) but the idea that this is inherently silly doesn’t really strike me as that reasonable.