When building with a slightly more recent version of bokeh (2.4.3 instead of 2.1.0) bulkvis.py needs to handle the Serve.args specially, e.g. with code like this:
from bokeh.command.subcommand import Argument
from bokeh.util.dataclasses import entries
...
if isinstance(opts, Argument):
opts = dict(entries(opts))
This way the use of add_argument will work even though the Serve.args are wrapped in bokeh's Argument class.