One of the first principles I learned in programming was coupling and cohesion. This type of graph-based measurement of program complexity already existed some

One of the first principles I learned in programming was coupling and cohesion. This type of graph-based measurement of program complexity already existed some 60 years ago. I think your hunch is on point, I think because the author conflates running time of a busy beaver with benchmarks of programmatic coupling and cohesion. Busy beaver algorithms are single-purpose programs. An eCommerce website is layers upon layers of interrelated modules and functions. I get where they're going, reducing a problem space down to its simplest representation is ideal. I just don't on first pass understand how busy beaver accomplishes this.