> I don't see how anthropomorphizing MoE <-> brain affords insight deeper than 'less activity means less energy used'.

I'm not saying it is a perfect analogy, but it is by far the most familiar one for people to describe what sparse activation means. I'm no big fan of over-reliance on biological metaphor in this field, but I think this is skewing a bit on the pedantic side.

re: your second comment about pruning, not to get in the weeds but I think there have been a few unique cases where people did lose some of their brain and the brain essentially routed around it.