Great way to put it, and exactly what I was trying and failing to point at. Cataphracts is a recent case that made me think about this too, a play-by-post wargame with heavy fog of war since messages may take days to arrive (like an RPG version of Neptune’s Pride or something).
Also, This Discord Has Ghosts in It. I think these ideas of “how to run a table”, and the aesthetic possibilities therein, are kind of underexamined, but I really appreciate the original West Marches post for being the first time I actually thought about how much about table structure for games is just mostly assumed.