In the author’s view, using a combination of content-addressing, signed content, and petnames would help decentralise that layer. It keeps centralisation around aggregators (because of the scarcity of attention), but mitigates their harmful lock-in.

I think the only purpose of this is to detain programmers from doing anything a non-Microsoft way.

Export and migrate your data between hosting options at any time

Most to-do lists give you no control over your data. Your tasks live inside the app, not in a document you can edit, and syncing is handled by whichever company made the app. If you don't like this, todo.txt is a great alternative.