The author completely misses what travel is for.
Compare it to a museum. You can see almost all of the artworks on the museum's website, in high-definition, accompanied by backstories and references. It's much more suitable to learn about art. But it's not _impressive_.
You need to experience the artwork to understand and internalize what you studied about it. Same with travel.
SMILES and SELFIES are molecular graph representations and aren't meant to solve the "parse this sum formula" problem.
SELFIES are for genAI. If you ask a VAE to generate SMILES, it will spit out some strings that are invalid - can't happen with SELFIES, that is the one application where they are robust.