I really like this framing. One may posit that natively a computer offers the possibility of complete malleability and as we build software, we shut this down as we try to strike a balance between expediency/economics, control/resilience and flexibility (you can argue what these variables are but they are always conflicting constraints).
But in my experience, once you take malleability away, trying to bring it back never seems to work out (I am thinking of things like Macros and VB Scripting in MSOffice). Maybe the question to ask is, to what extent we should preserve malleability at every level of software abstraction?