That seems too cheap and rote to me, making religion just an excuse to hold tech back and the player being effectively enlightened by having 21st century sensibilities is a lame trope. Practically Isekai levels of lame, "look at you dumb people living in this world for generations, behold the power of my ignorance!"
Yes, I know the Luddites were, well, luddites in the real world. The sector however has been nearly exterminated by AI twice and AI cores do go rogue if you install them as administrators and then try to remove them. But as long as you keep them in place they provide benefits strong enough to negate four player skills which seems extremely OP even with the cost of pather cells and a few Hegemony inspections (they are rare enough that you can easily bribe them away, the costs are trivial compared to just the savings of not hiring administrators).
Regarding game balance well, I think having conflicts with the Hegemony shouldn't be such a piece of cake (strongest faction in the sector and all), and maybe the whole bribing thing could have high reputation and contact requirements, so as to make a high investment necessary to be available at all, effectively balancing the easy money.
Regarding the lore, luddites were doing weird religious demonstrations well before the gates fell, they ALSO have an entire terrorist organization that destroyed the single most successful planet in the sector, yeaaah they are totally reasonable people. Fanatics are fanatics, now, 10 thousand years before, and a million years after (a realistic depiction, even benign at times).
No idea about the sensibilities thing of yours, that sounds like a strawman.
There's people in the sector who profit from AI use without many issues, there's also a comment by the historian that implies that the second AI menace was designed by Artemisia Sun as a failsafe should her authority be undermined, the first one could have been a design screw up or an actual attempt by tri-tachyon to take over the sector (very likely).
What I'm going for is not that AI is harmless, AI is supposed to have both programming, and to have varied amounts of free will.
The interaction when you try to disconnect it is excellent because it actually tries to negotiate with you. If its going to betray you, potentially one of its best allies, then it needs a reason, AI being just "eevil :O :O" would be terribly boring, terminator levels of boring.
AI shouldn't be a big bad homogeneous technosatan, it should be as varied as people, different cores, different motivations caused by both malfunctions and design choices when building them. I'm ok with a certain AI being particularly homicidal, I'm not ok with reducing AI to the "omnicidal maniac" without giving good explanations for it.