I always see analogies as he effective at their chosen level of resolution (similar to your scale).

At dinner-table-conversation level, or 5 year old kid level, these water analogies work.

If you need to actually produce something, they’re completely useless.

But for most stuff/people, Newtonian analogies work surprisingly well, so long as we always qualify it with “remember, this isn’t actually how it works, this is just an analogy to get you closer to how it works”.