This feels like a blogpost about graphic design using too many grids and tables. It doesn't really dive deep into the conundrum of what UI could be when the system is "symbolic all the way down", with the basic digital representation of 0 and 1 groupings primarily existing as a leveraging mechanism for defining other symbols.

With everything physical and freeform, the problem of measuring and aligning becomes primary. Tool precision drives what our built environment can look like. For UI to evolve likewise, it has to pay considerable attention to what documents are measuring. At the most primitive level this is always linear memory cell structures, even if they have some data attached indicating representation as a connected graph or other structuring mechanism. But time and again we opt to adopt something with higher level representation, which then creates the need for a custom toolbox, and I think that in turn drives the use of tabular and grid presentation as a way of putting the toolbox within reach. If you don't have more than one tool, UI disappears.