[BoiledCabbage]

Yup, it's essential function composition.

If IIRC technically it's a bit more. It's a monad just like function composition, but it's bind has to handle data threading and short-circuit behavior. If you squint it's not too differently than than a parser combinator over Applicative matching a sequence of characters. Composing operations to correct thread sequential data while handing short circuiting.

I'm not certain about the optimizations due to associativity. While yes function composition is associative, that just builds the query. Running the query itself must be sequential as each operation depends on the data from the prior, leaving I believe little room for optimization.