This reminds me of the debate between programmers who want to design an elegant system that accomplishes all the desired functions as consequences of a fundamentally simple design, and the programmers who just want to make it work and ship. Depending on the problem you're solving, and the constraints you're working under, I think either approach can be appropriate.

I think the resemblance is only superficial. There is nothing inelegant in treating two wired-in-parallel robotic arms controlled by the same controller, in same way regardless of whenever the controller is same 'real physical object', especially considering that we live in the world where if you have two electrons (or two identical anything), them being separate objects is purely in the eye of the beholder.

The whole point is that you abstract out inelegant details such as whenever the same controllers are physically one system or not. This abstraction is not at odds with mathematical elegance, it is the basis for mathematical elegance. It however is at odd with philosophical compactness-by-confusion. This abstraction does not allow for the notion of causality that was oversimplified to the point of irrelevance.