Or throughput, which is important in areas with congestion, like busy streets and highways.

It probably was at some scale, but it's just not attested. And it certainly wasn't the entire nation..

The Babylonian exile on the other hand is attested. That was more like a royal hostage situation than slavery though, the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem and took the nobility back with them.

That was one that you can just tell was a very highly contested script that just kept getting rewritten again and again by writers with very different sensibilities. The core idea is great, but man is the execution uneven

I call this Machinical Turking