That makes sense, but when you're asking philosophical questions about the ontology of computing and information, then if talk of information is just a shortcut for the messy complicated physical process, one can eliminate it from the fundamental "furniture" of the world.
One might respond with a shrug and who cares, but then we have people making rather strong claims about the universe being a computer and bit from it. Similar to mathematical universes instead of just physical stuff.
Notions like Kolmogorov complexity make information a measurable quantity. E.g. most possible configurations are incompressible. Only a few are compressible.
Additionally, having access to the information of one system allows us to reduce the amount of information needed to describe another system, and we get mutual algorithmic information.
So the notion of information is not just syntactic sugar, but distinguishes between different types of physical configurations in a way that enumerating their parts cannot.
One might respond with a shrug and who cares, but then we have people making rather strong claims about the universe being a computer and bit from it. Similar to mathematical universes instead of just physical stuff.