The connection between SEMs and DAGs is really interesting. The underlying models are very similar but developed independently -- SEMs coming from the psychometrics tradition and popularized by Jöreskog, DAGs coming from Bayesian Networks and popularized by Pearl. There are deep connections between them -- we have done some work on that (e.g. https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/2kqxr and https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.13220).