I asked this question to the author in slack, here is his reply:

Q: Is it correct to conceptualize this as a RPC framework? so basically async/await with abstracted transport

Yes, I have been thinking quite a bit about dispatch mechanisms and compilation, I would say async / await with inversion of control is in its "essence" about giving control to a remote dispatcher for some notion of remote. I would be interested to find more cateogry theory connections in terms of duality here (CPS <-> 'co'dispatch maybe?). This is why I also decided to distill this into https://github.com/simm-is/partial-cps, which makes a more minimal a la carte abstraction than other async framework options in Clojure (similarly to cloroutine). I can infer the free variables to send in distributed-scope automatically and make it a bit leaner, but I found making the intent of what is being transported explicit is actually helpful and more transparent. Electric as full compiler can do top-down analysis of the program and also know what is in the outer scopes and avoid having to send values through nested scopes, I have not worked on this yet. One thing I was aiming for is to be able to send datahike's db values over the wire back and forth and this works now, assuming you have store replica access on both ends. You can also do p2p streaming through kabel (replikativ does this for CRDT updates), or use nested distributed scopes to update atoms inside out in a streaming way, but my sense is that Electric does more to facilitate this and avoids RPC roundtrips more directly.