The analogy holds, yes.

In SEO, you are trying to give the SE what it wants. You want to be a trusted source that is promoted by the search engine. The same holds true under this kind of reputation system.

Your on-page SEO is sculpted to showcase domain expertise and a lot of it. Similarly, in this rep system, you would want to publish content that makes others view you as a trusted source in whatever area it is you are publishing in. You also don't want to spend that trust by linking to a bad source.

Your off-page SEO is an even stronger analogy. The Sybil attack that @edicted is talking about is, in SEO-terms, a low-quality PBN. Just spinning up a thousand accounts or a thousand blogs and linking back to yourself does not work because those feeder accounts don't have any authority on their own.

The side effect of this is that high-quality, relevant PBNs are still effective and worth a lot of money. In this new rep system, a high-trust account could be sold along with its authority to a bad actor. Hopefully, if that happens in a way that produces a really negative result people could respond and remove their support.