The first few graphs are impressive, it does a much tidier job. The Go queue one is objectively worse - the other versions keep services and users grouped together, as well as a left-to-right flow. The TALA version makes it look more complicated than it is.
For the first one, Elk makes it obvious that everything is flowing into “database” or “reports.” This seems like an important part of the design.
The post mentions that it doesn’t do DAG as well as Dagre or Elk, so, known and honestly stated limitation. I wonder if it would have been better to start with the SoC or AWS example, though.
TALA is terrible at respecting the "direction: <up, down, left, right>" directive. It should choose an aspect ratio based on the direction, but instead it is trying to make the diagram as square as possible.
