SICP is mainly a book about how to structure systems. It also tells you how languages work, but in far less detail.

PLAI (this book) teaches you how languages work. It also tells you a bit about how to structure systems, but that is not its goal. In part that is not a goal because of the existence of books like SICP and, increasingly, DCIC [https://dcic-world.org/].

Oh wow. If I was an educator, this book "A Data-Centric Introduction to Computing" is what I would put in front of people first.

Everything you do in software is in service of moving and munging of data, programming paradigms are tools secondary to that.

You are right. I have now binged 2/3 of PLAI. It is really nice in how it draws the landscape of programming languges and how they work. It of course also has an advantage being a newer book, programming languages and their theory have progressed quite a lot since writing of SICP.

Also it is some how pedagogically really nice, very approachable and readable.