I mean there should be _some_ sugar in a language like swift, no? It has sugar in many parts of the language, being able to define a simple type union should not require custom declaration of every forwarding accessor, a protocol, an enum, bridging back and forth between them, etc.

It would be one thing to say that the vertical bar is a shortcut for these more exhaustive constructs (setting aside whether these constructs are actually exhaustive - they're not really for the purposes they're used for in practice), but as it is right now, you have no bar! If it were simple and easy to use you'd have enums dictate the state of every app which, as any app developer knows, is not how its currently done! Swift enums are so hard to use you have just a mess of optionals on view state instead of how it should formally be done, where almost every non-trivial view has a single state that's an enum of all possible configurations of valid states.

Indeed, if you put in a ton of effort to try and go down this route defining views "properly" with something like Swift TCA, you're not going to be able to get there even if you break up your app into 40 different targets because incremental recompilation will take a few minutes for something as simple as a color change.