I agree. Though it's possible that it makes sense to have some ideas "unified" into a single state variable if only some configurations of the pair of values ar

I agree. Though it's possible that it makes sense to have some ideas "unified" into a single state variable if only some configurations of the pair of values are sensible, and you want to keep both in lockstep - or if things trigger off of state changes in any of several values, and you want to modify several values at a time.