Specifically, the application of dataflow to GUIs, which was well-researched at Adobe by Sean Parent, Mat Marcus, et al in the early 2000s called the "Adam" and "Eve" languages. There's more work at TAMU & University of Turku (by Jaakko Jarvi) under the name "Espresso", or something like that.

Basically, the "scopes" become constraints, and they use a hierarchical constraint solver to propagate state changes to the GUI elements, real-time, using a declarative dataflow programming model.