This is more like the empirical "laws" that various engineering disciplines use. I.e. some number crunching that has no theoretical foundations whatsoever, but seems to be working anyway.

What is physics, if not a transition between states? Whether the merchanism that predicts those transitions is machine- or human-interpretable is orthogonal.

An attempt to describe fundamental nature of the word, best as we can get at it. Unless you're an antirealist, or you think the universe is just information.

Even if universe is still information, knowing laws which govern change of that information is no lesser valuable.

This reminds me of my tribology course. The professor said at the beginning that there weren't many real equations but here are some lookup tables.