Our brain is a computer. That fact may or may not offer useful insights on the properties of brains that we care about.
Likewise, our brains are engines, converting energy from one form to another, and hence governed by thermodynamics. Again, that fact may or may not be useful for investigating properties of the brain we care about.
Our brains are also matter, meat, networks, made of atoms, and squishy. These are all facts, they may or may not be useful.
Or our brain is a telegraph, the world wide web, an orchestra, a theater, a tv, millions of mindless bots, etc.
We use metaphors to help understand things we lack a literal explanation for, or the full explanation is complex and ongoing (neuroscience, biology, chemistry).
See Marr's 3-levels hypothesis. If we "run" an algorithm able to find a program to compute arbitrary data, there must to exist that general algorithm. We (just) need to copy it and implement in silicon..