I think we need to wait until there's something more substantial to go on. The headline makes it sound like this is a thing, when in fact (as far as we know so far?) it's a rumor.

There's a long tradition of "$Person hasn't been seen in public -> gigantic dramatic narrative" in media stories about authoritarian countries. No doubt it's great for clicks, but these things mostly turn out not to be true. If this one turns out to be true, we'll certainly find out and discuss it then.

Edit: also, there have already been a bunch of major threads on basically this same story: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...