[istjohn]

You're intuition is correct that the rectangles would overlap if projected by a light like shadow puppets. Instead, imagine a series of lasers up and down the vertical axis positioned so that their beams are parallel to the plane that contains the sphere's equator. And imagine that the lasers spin 360 degrees around the vertical axis but their beams always stay parallel to the plane of the sphere's equator. That's the projection being described here.

[Twisol]

Right. Effectively, we're projecting every horizontal slice of the sphere laterally to a fixed distance from the vertical axis. It's a stack of 1D projections, not a single 2D projection.

[Twisol]

I realized after the fact that the more useful terms would be “orthogonal projection” and “perspective projection”. The novelty of the orthogonal projection at hand is that it’s projecting (flattening) in a cylindrical space.

With an orthogonal projection, you can usually think of it as taking two planes and squashing whatever object your want to project between them. In the scenario here, the ambient space has been wrapped up, so one of these squashing planes has been wrapped into a cylinder, and the other has been wrapped into a line (the degenerate case).

In either event, an orthogonal projection is indeed a collection of orthogonal projections of one dimension less. But that’s not really the whole picture.