Those differences definitely don't amount to Jim Crow On Steroids.
I always enjoy reading IK's posts even when we disagree because he makes his views clear and attempts to explain them in a compelling way. Here are the two reasons I think he and I see things so differently:
1)
The role of a government in democratic society -- The way I read IK, it seems like his view is that democratic governments only have an obligation to make voting reasonably accessible so that it isn't "too hard" for people to vote. Obviously people can disagree about where that threshold line is. But my reading of IK is that governments are free to monkey around with voting requirements for basically any reason as long as they stay above that threshold line.
I view it differently. My perspective is that democratic governments have an obligation to make it as easy as possible for people to vote, subject to considerations regarding voter security and resources. If a government makes it more difficult for certain people to vote, and there are no compelling security or resource reasons for doing so, I see that as a betrayal of democratic principles by the government. And in the case of the Georgia law, there do not appear to have been any compelling reasons to make these changes.
2)
Context -- IK seems to just want to talk about these laws in the abstract, without really discussing intent. As long as a law doesn't make it "too hard" to vote it's fine, and the Georgia law doesn't make it too hard to vote in his estimation. So it doesn't really matter why Georgia did this, as long as the final law is generally OK.
But in my view that misses the entire story. In 2020, due to the pandemic, voting restrictions were relaxed. As a result of these changes, voter turnout went up by A LOT, especially in the runoff Senate elections. In addition, the pandemic changes do not appear to have been particularly costly, and investigations turned up no evidence of fraud. This should have been greeted by a pro-democracy government as GOOD news. Somehow, Georgia had figured out a way to get more people to vote and it didn't cost much and it didn't appear to contribute to fraud. A well-meaning government should lean into that success to try to see if it can make it even easier for people to vote without the state spending a lot or inviting fraud.
But of course Georgia is a state that has been dominated by Republicans for decades, although it has been getting closer and closer. And in 2020 the Democrats finally won statewide elections there under the new voting rules, but by very small margins. So the Republican government chose to try to make it harder for certain people to vote, the exact opposite of what a well-meaning government should do in that instance. There does not seem to be any reasonable explanation for most of these changes other than partisanship. And due to the tiny margins in these Georgia elections, even slight changes to make voting harder can swing the state.
This context is why I don't think the "Jim Crow" comparison is so off the mark. Sure, the law here isn't as onerous as old-timey literacy tests or poll taxes. But it has the exact same intent (suppressing votes from certain populations) and has a reasonable chance of having the same impact (creating a mismatch between the preferences of eligible voters and the preferences of those that actually cast a ballot so that the party with less support can stay in power).