I strongly recommend you read the book.
Oh but it absolutely does. If you live next to a park and your teenage kid want to put an ice cream shop in your garage to operate on summer afternoons, zoning laws prevent it. Anti nuisance laws would not. If you want to run a single-seat hair salon in your neighbourhood, so that the old folks who can't drive could still get their hair cut locally, zoning laws prohibit it.
Obviously if you want to open a commercial shipping and receiving warehouse in your garage, both regimes would prevent it.
No matter what, zoning won't let me have a machine shop in my garage. The thing is that machine shops aren't all the same:
If I'm servicing heavy equipment there will be low-beds delivering equipment, a driveway full of grit, disassembled machines and oil stains along with welding and arc-air gouging, etc. Not something you want next door; nuisance laws stop this.
If I'm making parts for medical instruments, everything is inside, you can't see or hear any of it when I close the door, and traffic consists of me making weekly trips to buy bar stock and the occasional courrier van. What nuisance is that?
Both are machine shops but they are far from having the same impact on a street.
It would be safe to assume a business with 30 employees would bring nearly 30 cars into the street and a coffee shop could increase foot traffic.
These things aren't necessarily true, but those assumptions aren't necessarily unreasonable. I think this is where things break down.
Out my way, when zoning does allow home-based business, restrictions are mainly about yard/accessory building usage, customer traffic/parking, and number of non-resident employees(I assume because of parking).
I see it as an honest attempt to prevent nuisance activity while allowing some flexibility but it also seems lazy and too restrictive. My hypothetical garage based machine shop could be non-conforming and be one complaint away from being shut down no matter how unobtrusive it is.
Do you want to live in a home where your neighbor definitely won’t open a night club next door? Or do you want to live in a home where, in the event your neighbor opens a night club next door, you have a solid argument to make when asking for a restraining order. Keep in mind actually enforcing the restraining order is another matter entirely.