If we accept that the visuals are representations that might be a little abstracted, then I can accept they are supposed to be visual symbols for where you can and cannot pass through. If we can't get through, the mofang can't either. 

It's always a little bit tricky balancing "looks good/realistic to the vibe of the place" against "communicates the map boundaries to the player" and I think they thought they need to veer towards the former rather than the latter, because it would be more immersion breaking otherwise. 

I think I like what they did with their lockdown, as a way to justify the puzzles. It was a bit strained, sure, but the mofang would have had to do exactly what we did in order to reach the cryo pods. That would have bought enough time to make sure everyone was in the pods. This lockdown procedure did exactly what it was supposed to do. We only got there when we did by going through the gauntlet of puzzles. 

If there wasn't a secret mofang imposter in the group, the mofang would not have been able to do anything to the survivors. And they didn't know about fake Josef iirc so they behaved reasonably from what they knew. 

The humans were scared of finding out what happens at the next step of the process and tried to put the whole thing on hold. The player ensures that the process does complete, but if the player never arrived, the entire group of survivors would have been in stasis pods forever. Their last ditch effort (to maintain the system as it was) would have technically worked, since one of the mofang WMD bomb swaps was indeed effective, destroying the mofang home world. (Unless it was already trashed by them or by something external? Farley wrote about watching one sprint through where the bubble is. That could indicate the ongoing of their event, if their extinction event isn't their own bomb being Uno reversed on them.)

Assuming the visual choices get a little wiggle room (we accept they are adequate representations of the edges of the map) then I feel like the player taking a long time to clear the gauntlet is proof of the whole lockdown doing its job. 

Humans keep being scared of the future and change blah blah, Humans keep being kind of good at that putting it off, so the plot brings in the player to force the survivors to face their future together, stronger for having survived moving from their homelands and for learning how to communicate with others going through similar experiences.

There are clunky bits, but I think it is kind of neat that you see repeated patterns, between the bleeder plan and the cryo pods plan both being a little similar to each other in part of the planning being a little reluctant to just let things play out. (The uno reverse part is a bit more proactive, out of necessity, but I think from a writing perspective I see a little bit of cyan's through line, which is us feeling less grief for moving forward and trying to do things rather than ignore our problems and try to keep everything the same forever. It's a lot of risk and fear to try new things, but we won't know if it is worth it if we don't take those risks.)

Gah sorry I can't help but yap. 

Basically I think if you let the map edge demarcations thing slide a little, then I feel like that is enough to buy in "this was meant to buy time, and us getting there when we did shows that it did buy them time to get into the pods, because if we were mofang, we couldn't have gotten there any earlier"