Great post! Just heard about this from one of our customers who slacked me with "He is describing Ascend.io!" :-)
Having spent 15+ years writing big data pipelines and building teams who do the same, I couldn't agree more... the conceptual model we're all quite comfortable with is this notion of cascading, materialized views. The challenge, however, is that they are expensive to maintain in a big data pipeline context -- paid either in system resource cost, or developer cost. The only reasonable way to achieve this is a fundamental shift away from imperative pipelines, and to declarative orchestration (a few folks mention this as well). We've seen this in other domains with technologies like React, Terraform, Kubernetes, and more to great success.