According to the post, the employees actively wanted to live somewhere else and were in a practical sense prevented from doing so. They also weren’t willing to work for next to no pay—that is again specifically one of the issues that was raised. It’s also plausible to me that the romantic attraction component was endogenous to the weirdness they were objecting to. It seems like the gist of your argument is ‘weird things they were happy to do’ >= ‘weird things they say they weren’t happy to do’, but a significant proportion of the components on the LHS should actually be on the RHS. That doesn’t mean that any of it is true, but your argument seems like a misreading of the post.
I agree that the payment does create some suboptimal incentives, but I’m operating under the assumption that Ben decided on giving the sources money after hearing about the bulk of what happened, and that they didn’t predict he would do so, rather than something like (to make it more extreme) ‘if you tell me enough crazy stuff to make this worth a forum post, I’ll reimburse you for your trouble’.
You could possibly do a more incremental version of this, e.g. link to a Google Drive where you upload the pieces of evidence as you find them? That way people could start updating right away rather than waiting until everything’s been put together. And then you could add a comment linking to the write-up when it’s done.