> Graphing data to analyze it - and then seeing shapes and creatures in said graph - is a distinctly human practice, and not an inherently necessary part of most data analysis...

I disagree. Even apart from the obviously silly dinosaur and star in the Datasaurus Dozen, the othe plots depict data sets which are clustered in specific ways which point clearly to something unusual going on in the data. For instance, no competent analysis of the "dots" data set would fail to call out that the points were all clustered tightly around nine evenly spaced centers. Whether you come to that conclusion through numerical analysis or by looking at a graph is immaterial, but, at least for us meatbags, drawing a graph is highly effective.