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The article is more about user experience than English language nuances.

Take one of your examples, you're much more likely to know you can "board" once you know there's a "ship." Without the ship as context first, only people who are already familiar with ships know that boarding is even an option.

This provides a poor experience in terms of discoverability.

The article clarifies the difference is interesting in thinking about how these orderings simplify autocorrection. It's less about spoken language (I'm unaware of any research on whether there's anything analogous to IDE autocomplete in human cognition, or even what form that would take) and more about how the order in which data is presented to an interactive editor changes how useful the assumptions the editor makes about context can be.

> We "lockpick" more often than we "save face" perhaps English is a head-first language.

The head of a sentence is its verb, so no.