Like, how does it get doughy and stretchy, even before kneading. The building blocks of bread and other baked goods at the start are near identical
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It’s the ratios of things, in part, and the specific processes in part. Bread is stretchy because the flour forms a stronger network of gluten. Cake batter isn’t stretchy in part because there’s just more liquid, so any gluten that forms isn’t able to hold together the whole dough, and in part because cake batter is used quickly after being mixed.
Gluten networks develop in flour+water combinations by having proteins in the flour mix with parts of the water but that takes time. You can speed it up significantly by moving it around a bunch (kneading it) so that more of the proteins that can become gluten come into contact with water, but you can also just let it sit for many hours for no-knead bread. If you leave your cake batter sitting for a long time, it’ll come out gummy and chewier because of that. ff you *do* experiment with doing that, make the cake from scratch and add the leavening just before baking, otherwise it’ll be gummy and chewy and also flat.
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