The comparison with the Norway model is more relevant than NJ gives it credit for. If nothing else it shows that it is fundamentally dishonest to guarantee that leaving the EU means leaving its architecture. For sure we might get a different deal, but it does depend rather on who leads the negotiations for that deal, does it not? The Norway etc deals were, says NJ, negotiated by closet Europhiles. So if that happened here we'd have the same sort of thing.
As I said to start with, though, it's equally wrong to insist that we *will* have a deal requiring free movement of EU workers, and the like. But we might. Nobody knows. It's not even obvious that a deal without those terms would necessarily be better; what might we have to give in return as part of the compromises that such negotiations inevitably involve?
The whole thing is clouded in massive uncertainty. For all the problems the EU may have, there is hardly any reason to suspect that leaving will necessarily solve them.