You are technically correct, but missing the point. It's an artificial constraint in a common context for fun.
The other problem with this argument is that it never ends: If you write on "bare metal" one can argue you are relying on thousands if lines of firmware and microcode. Then you go even lower and one can argue that your high level CISC ISA is doing too much work for you. Eventually you end up with transistors and then people will end up arguing which transistor is the least complex design to fabricate. I will admit trying to compute with sticks, stones and crabs (for real) is a fun idea, but it's hard to achieve much beyond a ripple adder.
I was refering to this article [0] where some computer scientists test out swarm crab computing in Japan, it's a fun read :) you can get the full text using reader mode in firefox.
