The essence of OOP is the Interface, the human interface, which conforms to human brain, rather than machines. It's all about the conceptual framework to abstract out complexity into the names corresponding to what we're trying to program in the first place. That's it. All the verbosity and complexity of OOP is the secondary effect to actualize the particular implementation of the Interface.

On the other hand, the fundamental particle of computing is indeed, not object, nor class, but a sequence of bits. However, the fundamental particle of programming, or collaborative programming so far, has been based on the idea of objects. If one has the better idea, it would be about making the Interface more friendly to human brains.