This appears to be exploration, to see if we can find new useful ways to display and interact with information.

There have been many, many experiments in the past. Design features that work (such as listy designs, tabular designs, 2D designs, non-overlapping designs, etc etc) have stuck around. By "work", I mean that they are useful, practical, easy to understand, easy to implement, non-patented, etc etc.

If we stop experimenting, then we will stop finding new useful design features and UI design will stagnate.

Yes, current UI design is "good enough." But where's the fun in that? Whatever you believe the purpose of life is, experimenting and furthering humanity's knowledge is typically considered a good thing.

I think that this particular experiment is useful, and that there is potential here for more efficient note-taking and knowledge sorting (which could, in the future, potentially benefit everyone). Imagine an author writing plot point ideas into an infinite canvas, then assembling them on the fly. And then they bring those points into a second canvas, where they group them by character. Then they can freely move the plot points between characters, or leave them to the side, not assigned to any character but there, on the "plot points by character" canvas, ready to be dragged on. But then if they're looking at the plot points on the "plot points by time" canvas, and they set a plot point's character to "X", then it will automatically move that plot point into the region of character "X" on the "plot points by character" canvas.

That's just one example. I can imagine more, such as a materials researcher trying to design an industrial process. They could be working through potential chemical products, trying to decide which to use at a particular point of the process. This freeform canvas would let them keep a card for each potential choice right next to the place in the process that it would be used. That proximity of information could be useful.

I've found that Blueprints (a 2D scripting language) in Unreal Engine get really messy, and you're constantly neatening your programs. This particular experiment, with its anti-overlap and automatic grouping features, might lead to good changes in Blueprints in UE that make them neater by nature.

It's so that the topology of the design system can mirror the topology of the information being stored. Top-to-bottom and left-to-right works great for information with a linear, generally one-way directional flow.

But how do you show that certain concepts are similar and related? Wiki informational design says that you should do that by splitting things up into atomic concepts that individually have a linear informational flow and using hyperlinks to connect them. You might group things into common categories.

Links can show a connection, but not how close those connections are or any correlations. The idea of whiteboarding is that you're not limited to segmented linear information flows, and you can represent your thoughts visually.

The "infinite canvas" is to a whiteboard what a wiki is to a filing cabinet of notecards. Or what a plotted graph is to a table of numbers.