This really sounds like the Xilinx XC6200 series FPGA. It has a few routing hierarchies but does strip out most of the routing a classical (for that time) FPGA has. I heard numbers that 70% of a FPGA is routing.

The XC6200 became news once as they[1] used an evolutionary algorithm to create a configuration that can detect a single frequency tone. The resulting configuration was determined that it was impossible that it could work, but it did. Placing the configuration in a different part of the FPGA broke it.

It seemed that algorithm used the analog properties of the FPGA in that specific location to get to a smaller result.

[1] https://www.idi.ntnu.no/emner/tdt22/2011/Thompsonieeeehw.pdf

If data only travels into local neighbors this is really a multi state cellular automata though

This sounds like the Systolic Array (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systolic_array) design google based its TensorFlow Processing Units on.