Yes, the post is focusing on the overall effect of operations (unitaries) rather than their continuous trajectories (hamiltonians acting on system via Schroding

Yes, the post is focusing on the overall effect of operations (unitaries) rather than their continuous trajectories (hamiltonians acting on system via Schrodinger equation) (analogous to working with impulses rather than forces). To make the continuous case interesting as a compilation problem, you'd need some alternate formulation of the Schrodinger equation, e.g. based on the limit of small powers of unitaries rather than on the matrix exponential, so that deleting i didn't delete literally all processes. Or you could arbitrarily declare real-only hamiltonians are permitted, despite the Schrodinger equation saying "i". But that'd be kinda lame, imo. (Note: am author of post)