This is their current social contract (i.e. constitution) - it might help answer some questions:

https://pdfhost.io/v/Hrr2IgtuS_SocialContractoftheDemocratic...

(Note that this is the 2016 edition, which replaced an earlier one from 2014, and is itself in the process of getting updated at the moment. They seem to subscribe to the notion that such things are supposed to be living documents.)

AANES is not majority Kurdish at this point, and several cantons are politically Arab-dominated. They did have some tensions in areas that they took over from Daesh, specifically with the more conservative rural Arab populations there pushing back against the feminist agenda that PYD brings; those are often perceived as being along ethnic lines from the outside, but I think it would be more accurate to call it an ideological dispute that happens to align with cultural (and hence ethnic) boundaries.

In some cases they actually had to dial things back to reach compromise; for example, the 2014 social contract stipulated that elected assemblies must have no less than 40% members representing each gender (defined as male or female; there's little trans awareness there). The new Arab cantons basically had a hard time even finding enough women candidates willing to run to fulfill that quota, so it was dropped in the 2016 contract. But they still kept the co-executive system with the informal expectation of at least one of those going to a woman. For another example, the very name AANES (and before it DFNS) was a compromise to avoid "Rojava" - the latter literally means "West" in Kurdish, as in Western Kurdistan, and thus has some Kurdish nationalist implications that other ethnicities weren't happy about.

PYD is also explicitly in opposition to KNC (in Syria) and KDP (in Iraq), and other nationalist Kurdish groups who explicitly seek an independent ethnically Kurdish sovereign nation-state. There was some collaboration between them early on in the civil war, when the focus was on resisting the Syrian government; but once it withdrew its forces from the region, the ideological differences were in full force again, to the point where there were some skirmishes between the PYD-affiliated YPG and the KDP-affiliated Peshmerga.

As far as Ocalan's cult of personality - it's definitely there, and it bothers me as well, but it seems to be the case of the guy who originally built it around himself now genuinely trying to promote democracy and anti-authoritarianism by capitalizing on his ability to deliver propaganda that will definitely be listened to. I doubt they'd have as much success with the whole women liberation angle, given how conservative the society is overall, if it wasn't Ocalan endorsing it. Still, the cult remains a very dangerous thing, and it is perhaps for the best that Ocalan is still in prison and thus can't fully tap into its power.

Another interesting thing is that at least the outward symbols of said cult seem to be negotiable. In particular, there were several cases where YPG splattered Ocalan posters in Arab settlements where the locals pushed back against them, seeing them as a symbol of Kurdish nationalism; the posters were then promptly taken down. Of course, it doesn't mean that the sentiment behind them is gone, but still...