Take game systems, as an example; far far more effort will be spent in the art and general asset management than is true for many business software setups. Which is why many of the business best practices haven't necessarily moved over to games.
Similarly, look at the general practices around building and maintaining bridges in physical world. We call all bridges by the same name, but reality basically dictates that what works in some locations cannot and will not work in others.
Now, you are right that we can grow large software out of smaller in ways that the physical can't do. But, it is a common fallacy to stall out a project by trying to be at google's scale from the start. Ironic, in many ways, as not even google was built to be at their scale from the start.
I think that in general we should stop using so much metaphors in the software world. There's no need to go look for a shed. If we had to statically type and test every shell commands we typed, we would lose lots of productivity. On the other hand, maintaining those very large scripts that started as a simple line and are now used for deploying all of our application, and tend to fail in surprising ways, would be easier.
The other problem with metaphors is that they are also hard to refute. I've never built a shed, nor worked on a high rise. I don't see why that experience would be relevant to building software, or necessary in a discussion about static typing.
Calling for lack of metaphor is interesting. In many ways, our industry is nothing but metaphors, so it is surprising for me to see them called down.
I agree that no metaphor is perfect. But, by that same logic, I would argue that no specified type is perfect. Especially if done so in a taxonomy that does not admit exceptions. (And again, I'm not against types.)
You're right that game development involves a lot of asset stuff that other business software doesn't have to worry about as much. (And, conversely, a lot of business software has to worry about large mutable datasets much more than most games.)
But I don't think that has much bearing on why some business software practices haven't made their way to games. I think the reasons are mostly:
* Games are structurally different from business software, so the patterns that work for the latter aren't always great for the former. MVC makes sense when the "UI" is a relatively thin layer insulated from the "logic". In most games, the "UI" (rendering, animation, VFX, audio, etc.) is huge and more deeply coupled to the game state.
* A lot of enterprise software practices are about maximizing developer productivity in a single codebase over a very long period of time at the expense of runtime performance. Game codebases often have a shorter lifespan and can't afford to sacrifice runtime speed for developer speed.
* Game developers can be insular and are often either oblivious to what's going on outside of games or think it's beneath them and not applicable to their "real" code.
For other examples, I would dip into major logistical simulations/optimizations. Which basically drop into linear algebra as soon as they can, where much of the idea of typing is basically thrown out, so that we can solve equations and constraints, with no real tracking of which is which at different locations. There is a tranlation in/out, but once in, things are effectively "matrix of values.
(As an amusing aside, I love that I get to message with the authors of books I'm reading on places like this. I have your Crafting Interpreters. Working through it at a glacial pace. Plan to pick up the other one next. Kudos and thanks!)
