A better argument against the plausibility of Darmok, imho, is that a dialect consisting exclusively of metaphors wouldn’t have enabled the kind of technical communication needed by a spacefaring people. So maybe they had a written technical language, basically math+.

I think it's in A CRACK IN SPACE that PK Dick posits an advanced alt-timeline species of apes who've achieved interplanetary travel technology based extremely rapid water freezing<--->condensation<---> evaporation. among the first things their ambassador is heard to say is "we can walk through wood"

This is some darker head canon I don’t want to believe, but it strikes me that the dialect we get from from the Tamarian bridge crew is similar to courtly dialect, where the elite show their status by constantly referencing the classical works or whatever their class has exclusive access to.