But that's only because (unfortunately for the airlines) miles are not a universally accepted currency. Just like some poorer countries needing to be bailed out by the IMF, despite issuing their own currency.

The strange way Chuck E Cheese is like a central bank.

You joke, and yet [Lucas 1988] uses an amusement park as a toy model to demonstrate how monetary shocks can affect real economic activity. The key difference between this and Chuck E. Cheese, though, is that Chuck E. Cheese is the only merchant that accepts their tokens for any sort of payment.

[Lucas 1988] https://home.uchicago.edu/~vlima/courses/econ203/fall01/Luca...

To be fair to the article, the title is "the strange way airlines are actually central banks", implying that it's just in that one way that they are central banks.

analogies compare dissimilar things with a common attribute

it is almost impossible to judge an analogy, despite how common it is to do so