Is there a physical analogy to the Turing Machine?
AFAIK the Turing Machine is modeled on the idea of a human with a pen and paper. The human has a certain state in the brain, looks at the paper like the machine looks at the tape, and writes something on the paper or moves to look at a different place, just as the machine does.

TM is archaic as Peano natural number arithmetic. TM is useless for practical computation, and it is of course not intended to be used for that. It is just a simple way to axiomatize computation so we can reason about what's computable and what isn't - just as Peano arithmetic is useful for defining from first principles what natural numbers are, and what are their properties - but it would be ridiculous to try to do arithmetic by manipulating Peano numbers by hand according to the theoretical definitions.

Just think how difficult it would be to prove different theorems from complexity and computability theory (e.g. prove that the Halting Problem is undecidable), if you had to prove them using the semantics of the C++ programming language instead of the Turing Machine. Your proofs would be ridiculous or impossible - as ridiculous as proving associativity of natural number multiplication by using the grade-school method applied to decimal integers as your definition of what multiplication is.