Could you clarify what "keep track of state of assets" means?
Of course, nothing stops Airflow or other tools fron thinking this way as well.
This is an oversimplification but IMO the easiest way of picturing it is instead thinking of defining your graph as a forward moving thing w/ the orchestrator telling things they can be run you shift to defining your graph nodes to know their dependencies and they let the orchestrator know when they're runnable.