[abrgr]

Great points.

It's very similar to a DAG you'd make for a workflow but not necessarily acyclic and events can be sent from external sources as well as internal processes.

States can be grouped into parent states, which gives you some additional nice things like parallel states and also a totally reasonable way to zoom out and hide info in visualizations.

When you have a pure function or a single effect, that should definitely just be a function rather than its own machine. Sate machines are most useful for orchestrating those effectful functions and for situations where you want to accept external events. So you're still writing regular code but you're writing it in small functions that get invoked by the state machine as needed.

That is, state machines don't replace code. They're just a really nice way to organize it.