I can definitely see the point the author is trying to make, and I agree that it naturally lends itself to a functional model of how the game works.
On the other hand, and this is speaking as someone who has played the game for an embarrassing number of hours all the way into endgame "megabase" territory: my mental abstraction of the game isn't really functional. It's directed graphs. Sure, the two views can be equivalent representations, but I find thinking about the game as a directed graph (and reasoning about throughputs in a graph representing a network) to be the perspective that gives actionable insights most readily.
On the other hand, and this is speaking as someone who has played the game for an embarrassing number of hours all the way into endgame "megabase" territory: my mental abstraction of the game isn't really functional. It's directed graphs. Sure, the two views can be equivalent representations, but I find thinking about the game as a directed graph (and reasoning about throughputs in a graph representing a network) to be the perspective that gives actionable insights most readily.