It is an interesting theory and a nice story; but I don't believe it. One of the key issues in programming systems is the profound uncertainty about what the system is meant to be doing. In chemical engineering you know exactly what is supposed to be built and have a clear idea of how the major reactions should work and what the tolerances are.

Both situations require design around uncertainty, but the chemical engineer is looking for practical kinks in a roughly-understood system. The programmatic system has no idea what is value add, what will stay or go or anything like that. In the extreme case you get things like Slack or Discord, where the plan wasn't even trying to build communications software to start with.

The nature and scale of the uncertainty is different. Software needs to adopt a fail-fast iterative approach with lots of feedback. Chemical engineers are looking for something else. The "pilot plant" concept wouldn't carry to software. Although the "we're going to throw this out" attitude works wonders (unless you rely on it happening, in which case that code is permanent now for some reason).