so I started my studies in animation actually, I used a lot of those tools, you can think of statebox as applying category theory to restructure aftereffects or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shake_(software)

when done right, we claim, you can target many different things ("semantics")

what we claim is something like, the compositional aspect of many such node based systems can be described as a certain type of mathematical object (monoidal category) ~ we can build an editor for that and then map that "dsl" to particular targets (image processing, state machines, etc)