But I would say that just because your preferred mental model is an abstract algebraic one where you build an abstract model that can apply to multiple situations doesn’t mean that such an architecture is best for every situation.
The article talks very clearly about the system and social constraints that it is optimizing for architecturally and ‘turning everything into a fold’ doesn’t immediately strike me as helping to meet the fast-build-feedback needs of the deep contributors and easy-and-safe-to-hack-in-modules needs of the weekend warrriors, which is what are described as the goals of the architecture.
But it also doesn’t strike me as very clearly not the case that the architecture has some of the features you’re describing.
It feels rather like you have a pet mental model which you think all architecture should subscribe to, and… I’m sorry but that seems naive.
I am trying to show 1) software architectures are useful, 2) if you abstract them you can find principles and relationships that allow you to transfer them to different domains, and transform them into different models, and 3) there is a lot of depth in software architecture and utility in learning it.
The article spends most of its time discussing social context in which architecture is developed (I agree it is important, but not everything) and in general downplays the utility of learning about software architecture (e.g. "“software design” is something best learned by doing", and later suggests there is little useful writing on software architecture).