I am a PL researcher and I too believe you may not fully understand what's going on.

To keep your analogy, the idea that a PL needs syntax to be used is comparable to the idea that a vehicle needs acceleration to get moving. Different flavors of syntax correspond to different means of propulsion.

Perhaps we will find good way to get rid of context free grammars (the horses in your example) and replace them with automatic pruning of parse forests (the current Tesla car of compilers) or even something more fancy like semantic editors (a fusion engine in your example) but unless you change the laws of physics, you can't get a vehicle without an accelerating engine nor a PL without an input syntax.