By my present understanding the most general answer belongs in realm of physics, not semantics, math of informatics. This is because these sciences are abstract, which means, they're operating with concepts, which are itself a generalization (i.e. abstracts) of many entities of reality. In addition, the math or informatics doesn't explain, what makes the numbers or bits countable units of reality, while the physics can develop the theory of countable colliding units aka particles.

Therefore for relevant explanation of natural law emergence and evolution we are required to have some minimal knowledge of physical reality. The AWT theory just minimizes the requirement of this knowledge by using of few trivial analogies, but it doesn't mean, it can form the only relevant explanation possible.

The AWT considers, the observable Universe is formed by "gradient driven" reality. This concept isn't very new in contemporary physics, but the Aether concept makes it quite easy to understand. Inside the random field of particles only the fluctuations of particle spatial density, i.e. the gradients can be observed. Depending on the ratio of mass/energy density, these fluctuations are having positive or negative curvature, which results in the attractive or repulsive forces on long/short distance scale. The important thing is, only these density gradients can be observed as a atemporal units of reality and only the gradients can serve for causal observation of another entities. This doesn't mean, the energy cannot spread by another way, i.e. without involving of density gradients, but the portion of inertial, gradient driven energy is considerably lower at this case.