Is it? I think it's an implementation of the pipe operator rather than satire of it. Javascript doesn't provide the flexibility to extend the language with pipe operators (though tools like Babel will let you use the pipe operator already).
The clunky syntax removes all the benefits of the pipe operator. The entire thing is syntactic sugar, wrapping it in confusing functions just breaks the entire concept.
Ahh OK. Yeah, I always find trying to shoehorn language semantics via functions to be kinda awkward. The best attempt I've seen is this addition of async/await to Lua, which actually looks pretty usable [1].
