Author here; I think I understand where you might be coming from. I find functional nature of R combined with pipes incredibly powerful and elegant to work with.
OTOH in a pipeline, you're mutating/summarising/joining a data frame, and it's really difficult to look at it and keep track of what state the data is in. I try my best to write in a way that you understand the state of the data (hence the tables I spread throughout the post), but I do acknowledge it can be inscrutable.