Lots of people seem to think that Visual / Textual programming is an either or. The idea behind statebox is to build a bijection between a (structured text)-editor and a Petri net that shows the program diagrammatically, editing either will edit also change the other so you can pick the perspective that best fits the change you'd like to make.

The original paper defining Petri nets was intended as a new foundation information systems based on communicating automata so that the fallacious "global state" idea is not a prerequisite. It makes a lot of sense for there to be a programming language based on this formal system for expressing computation.

There has also been a lot of progress in understanding the mathematical structure of Petri nets which is something like a symmetric monoidal category but I'm no expert so fact check me.