> But we already had way too many possibilities using ordinary mathematics! We need to narrow down on specifics, not muddy the waters by making things even more general.

Building a more general tool can sometimes solve a specific problem than trying to tackle the specific problem directly.

I also think you're missing the forest for the trees here. There are many general relationships in physics that are spontaneously appearing in the structure of Wolfram's hypergraphs. That's interesting enough on its own to be worth further research.

In one sense, this shared structure shouldn't be surprising, because it's often harder to not make something Turing complete, so in a way I expect a lot of shared structure between physics and various general computational models. On the other hand, it's getting harder to squeeze more progress out of traditional approaches, so shrinking a computational model to exactly match physics on long timescales is a unique attack vector worth exploring.