I saw the original article when it came up at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18303019 a couple of days ago. M. Siebenmann is articulating part of one of the points that I was going to raise.

For what it's worth, the nosh doco does try to articulate the difference between the dependencies of wants/, conflicts/, et al. and the ordering relationships of before/ and after/. The former control the extent of the set of jobs that system-control constructs for an action, whilst the latter control the order that the jobs in that set are then executed in.

* http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/guide/system-control.html