OP is suggesting that the source is repeatedly coming out with either comically or disturbingly exaggerated stories from NK. It's a pretty shitty place to live, but you don't need to unquestioningly swallow every wild story you've heard or read about the place on that grounds that "it sucks"

I consider exit visas to be not a good sign, confiscation of passports to be another (the US IRS), and a new tool of the UK that is extrajudicially sanctioning their own citizens (see Graham Phillips) for yet another. Not to say these countries are close to equal but they are more alike than we might realize and increasingly more so in worrying ways.

‘The safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people’ - US Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter

There are several North Koreans that leaves to work or study in Russia and China, their neighbour countries.

Yes, they can do that but cannot stay, the collateral being their family in NK.

A lot of people in the US can't leave either. Not because their government won't let them out, but because no other government would let them in.

Are we seriously comparing emigration possibilities in the North Korea and the US here?