To address your last question, I think they are proposing (but have not yet demonstrated) that the human neocortex works this way, and I imagine the motivation

To address your last question, I think they are proposing (but have not yet demonstrated) that the human neocortex works this way, and I imagine the motivation for being more biologically realistic (beyond its usefulness in learning more about the biology) is that biology is still outperforming AI in these tasks.