Is this really the action/messaging pattern that Next, Be and then Apple and probably others used about 30 years ago, or did I miss something here.

It was useful in a way but basically evolved into interface-based controller patterns due to the needed complexities and the whish to keep the basic underlying design pattern. So I'd expect to see lots of enhanvement requests once that box was opened :)

There was an early Java UI toolkit by some browser vendor (IFC by Netscape, probably) that allowed to string action elements together like that.