The thing is, that exact approach was tried in the 80s with the transputer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer) a

The thing is, that exact approach was tried in the 80s with the transputer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer) and it's a very compelling computation model, as you've pointed out. However, what was discovered was that programming the machines and the analysis required to produce code that communicated that way was hard, with specialist languages like occam (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam_(programming_language) being required, and all sorts of scaling issues appearing. As a student during this period, I learnt occam and wrote stuff for various transputer development boards. The basic principles live on in the XMOS processors which have found a niche in signal processing applications (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMOS) although there may be other applications i'm unaware of that has also adopted the idea.