I am not sure it is even necessary to be too recent. Christopher Alexander wrote a wonderful essay back around 1965 entitled a "City is not a tree" which makes the interesting point that trees are a relatively simple concept for our brains to grasp in a single bite. But beyond that, they are not really all that useful for modelling the real world - in his sense, the urban landscape. With just a little more effort we can also conceive of semi-lattice structures which are more useful and human-affirming.
"For the human mind, the tree is the easiest vehicle for complex thoughts. But the city is not, cannot, and must not be a tree. The city is a receptacle for life. If the receptacle severs the overlap of the strands of life within it, because it is a tree, it will be like a bowl full of razor blades on edge, ready to cut up whatever is entrusted to it. In such a receptacle life will be cut to pieces. If we make cities which are trees they will cut our life within to pieces."
Fortunately we are not most of us building cities. But I think the warning about conceiving patterns using trees just because they are relatively easy is a broader one. We do cut things and thoughts and information into pieces.
