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RichardKennaway comments on Applying utility functions to humans considered harmful - Less Wrong
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It seems simple to convert any computable agent-based input-transform-output model into a utility-based model - provided you are allowed utility functions with Turing complete languages.
Simply wrap the I/O of the non-utility model, and then assign the (possibly compound) action the agent will actually take in each timestep utility 1 and assign all other actions a utility 0 - and then take the highest utility action in each timestep.
That neatly converts almost any practical agent model into a utility-based model.
So: there is nothing "wrong" with utility-based models. A good job too - they are economics 101.
This does not work. The trivial assignment of 1 to what happens and 0 to what does not happen is not a model of anything. A real utility model would enable you to evaluate the utility of various actions in order to predict which one will be performed. Your fake utility model requires you to know the action that was taken in order to evaluate its utility. It enables no predictions. It is not a model at all.