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Exactly, there's no rationale given, nor any practical example of where this would be useful. Mutability is already a source of complexity, adding time-traveling to it seems like it would just make it worse...

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Initially I followed the link wondering if perhaps the author had done something interesting regarding append only ledgers and derivative generation processing semantics (e.g. event 5 modifies event 2, impacting the proper processing of events 3 and 4). After all, the linearity of the character stream is not unlike log offset/ledger row.

Frequently these esoteric languages have very interesting purposes.

I don't know if this is still the case, but I recall needing to run LaTeX twice before it would produce the correct output. Something like this might make it easier to generate documents in one pass.

Sometimes LaTeX produced auxiliary files (e.g. for the table of contents) at the end of a compilation that that therefore wouldn't be used until the second pass. Long time since I needed to know that...

I read the proposal as immutable within a given tick.

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