The whole pipeline has been designed so the view transform happens late, ideally just before conversion to output color space (but that’s not possible because of all the legacy modules), and the artistic transforms are done before. The reason is the view transform might need to change depending on the dynamic range of the output (even though for now it’s pretty much an 8 bits SDR LED panel all the time, for reasons that have to do with Gtk/Xorg, but let’s think ahead and prepare).
The pipeline order has not necessarily direct ties to the editing order. Image basic don’t imply the module should come early in the pipe, that place in the pipe depends on what kind of signal you expect, aka what you want your pixels to represent.
Don’t get mistaken by filmic’s reconstruction, it’s only meant to ensure smooth gradients where the dynamic range ends, in case there is highlight clipping. It’s more like a last-chance safety jacket than a technical signal reconstruction.
Pastel is achieved by pushing the saturation sliders left and purity sliders right in color balance rgb.