I see plenty of words there. Visual notation is great for conveying spatial relationships, no doubt about that, and spatial layouts can work well as secondary notational aspects, there is nothing to argue about there. But would you want to read war and peace in dataflow diagram format?

I'd read a story written as a dataflow diagram if it made good use of the format.

War and Peace has been made into a movie at least half a dozen times.

How about War and Peace performed by mimes?