Yes, I also found the description a little weird because of the emphasis on linear-time parsing. It is cool theoretically, and it could be understandable from a perspective of "make the compiler fast", but parsing is never the bottleneck in modern compilers. For a systems programming language this seems to be the wrong emphasis.
Yes, I would go the opposite in terms of simplicity.
Parse once for syntax and symbol definition, 2nd pass over parsed structure to link symbol references to their definitions. Two uncomplicated passes.
That handles a general code graph - so the language can go anywhere, and never be fundamentally held up by limitations of early syntax/parsing decisions.
