[jhot]

I used to consult in the document capture space (OCR, classification, data extraction) and one company I worked for wanted to sell UiPath. I showed them how I could do all of that in code (even built a wrapper around AutoHotkey for Windows UI interaction) with way less time, effort, and hair pulling. They said it wouldn't sell because businesses think they can have someone implement a low code solution and they'll take it over eventually, and a significant portion of their revenue is from licenses.

I luckily no longer consult and now am an automation engineer for a company and I get to build things the way I want. So far a lot of Go and a little bit of Node and things are great. I'll take that any day over "We sell X, so you use X for everything."

That said, for home automation I do use Node Red and absolutely love it. The integration with Home Assistant is top notch and prototypes and tweaks take no time at all. It's much more like functional programming than a lot of low code tools and the function node allows for whatever JS you want. So if I need to do something complicated that would take a ton of individual nodes and spaghetti to work natively, I can just drop in some code and move on.