He's the author of Odin, so he has experience writing compilers, so he also wrote a toy compiler in his language as a fun weekend project I guess. Of course it's only a good learning resource for people familiar with Odin. I don't know much about Odin, but from glancing at the code it looks like there are some memory management related features that he's using, which would look uglier in other languages.
I think in this case it's mostly because of groupthink and respect for authority. Many Chinese probably think "This doesn't seem right, but I don't understand politics and the people in charge have decades of experience, so I'm sure they do the right thing". And because of the seniority system the people in charge are often very old and have formed their value system during the tumultuous and poor Mao Zedong era.
I assume machine learning doesn't work well enough when the photo gets shared to friends of friends and facebook has to compare the bikini shots against 10,000 other users
