Nice article! I was going to write about DeFi 2.0 and Olympus. Beat me to it!

I like the concept that they purchase the liquidity using (locked-up, discounted) sales of their native token, rather than renting it through high APY.

It seems a potential solution to "toxic liquidity" (a.k.a. mercenary capital in your quote). Just a better alignment of incentives. Although I wasn't sure it would work for a new protocol, since usually there isn't much market cap to sell until you get the TVL off the ground.