Interesting, but is the required combination of EML gates less complex than using other primitives?

Depends on how you define complexity?

Like when the Apollo guidance computer was made, the bottleneck was making integrated chips so they only made one, the NOR gate, and a whackton of routing to build out an entire CPU. Horribly complex routing, very simplified integrated circuit construction

In general, no.

It's about symbolic computation more than calculations.

Yes, and it's not all that useful there either.

Eg ln is a rather complicated construct, it's not even a function. That's because for complex numbers, e^x is not bijective, and thus its inverse ain't a function.

So using that complicated construct to define something simpler like addition invites extra complexity.