It's one of my favourite books and I thought that it paired quite nicely when talking about software like Zapier or Tray.io that try to solve such a complex thing.
It is literally looking at json schemas and API specs and the connecting fields together. A date-time field is connected to another API's date-time.
Essentially, you are implying that enabling no-code integration with thousands of 3rd party services is easy.
Classic case of: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/
APIs are unreliable. Schemas change with no warning. Data you expect might be missing and data you don’t expect might show up. You would be surprised how often things don’t work as you’d expect them to.
Zapier sounds like theyre maintaining these integrations so that they are tested and they work? That alone is a lot of work.
These days though, many more are maintained by the API providers themselves, since it benefits them to provide a no-code solution for their users to link their API to thousands of others - a service provider can only build and maintain so many direct integrations themselves. https://zapier.com/platform
If the API provider is already maintaining the integration, it's a matter of automation providers moving towards a standard for how to express integrations as the ecosystem matures.