Fascinating! Thank you for sharing, OP! Having recently gone down a similar rabbit hole [1], having references and starting points is incredibly useful for further exploration, as this stuff is very hard to search for.
There does seem to be a direct computational link between information and the universe - and the way we’re using this link now , with classical computers, is highly abstracted and inefficient (the article also compares current energy cost of computing vs the much much lower theoretical limit). Quantum computers come closer to the nature of that link, but still require many abstractions.
I wonder if it will be possible to eventually compute without abstractions, directly on the substrate of the universe. Though that might be equivalent to real magic ;)