Cult checklists are nonsense trash made up to serve as a rhetorical cudgel, in the same vein as when the definition of authoritarian was fudged by leftist academics to mean "right-wing," and I wouldn't recommend cult comparisons based on that. The trick is to selectively run the test against groups they already dislike and then triumphantly wave it about, as if it means anything. A good way to test my claim (I didn't, lol) is to run it against a range of groups, from benign associations to Heaven's Gate, seeing how many false positives you get. But this is a procedural complaint and I'll explain the reasons for it further down.
That said, they definitely overlap on some of the individual traits (or checklist items), ones about enforcing ideological homogeneity and seeking to control members' information environment.
This type of rhetorical cudgel can in fact be part of information control, boxing a source or site into some scary category so as to dissuade people from engaging with the core content. I'm sure you can see the parallels with, as Xpadder said, "browsing habits issue". The thing about it is that most people can't even run a checklist honestly, and instead run on a logic of us vs. them. So it's a mere ritual to legitimate what they were already were thinking. This is the reason I'd recommend against using them.
Better would be to focus on the traits directly: how they want to be the sole source of information, as someone mentioned upthread. And how they seek to control what sources someone else relies on. Though, the latter part is still very much accepted by the average leftoid as how things ought to be done. The former is also why Wikipedia regularly gets subverted by coalitions of jannies and their activist buddies.
I think the actual devastating observation, which directly led to TCRF's current situation, is the affected "I don't care" attitude, while being so obviously buttmad about the slightest form of disagreement. This has been an obvious flaw of the goon psychology for decades. Cult leaders get away with it, these guys reach new heights of lolcowdom instead. It only works when you already have a widespread optics support, for example the previous Twitter janny regime. It really shows how these people are blindly applying a hand-me-down playbook.