It's not a new or exotic conceptualization, it's a recovery of the semantics that Codd had in mind and well defined in fact-oriented modeling approaches like object-role modeling / NIAM and FCO-IM. It provides conceptual parsimony: attributes are just relationships between entities and values, and n-ary relationships are handled consistently rather than being reduced to binary relationships, among other things. And if more people adopted this, we might get better data abstraction layers incorporated into development frameworks than object-relational mappers (which should rather be renamed to "network data model to SQL mappers").