This approach seems to be simply implementing short-circuit boolean operators e.g. as soon as any AND condition is false, then false; as soon as any OR conditio

This approach seems to be simply implementing short-circuit boolean operators e.g. as soon as any AND condition is false, then false; as soon as any OR condition is true return true. The first example of evaluates every condition in a bottom up approach. While it's implemented as a FSM it doesn't need to be. I think using ROBDDs (binary decision diagrams) or unrolling the AST into opcodes would be a more standard way of implementing optimisations.