Workflow's advantages are that it A) covers the whole gamut of simple to insane with a single product, and B) has a sharing gallery so you can easily use someone else's magic without understanding it.
Maybe Apple killed the automation position because they were planning to replace it with Workflow, but do you expect them to backport the whole thing onto the Mac? In which case, are they going to actually maintain the user-submitted workflow gallery that makes it useful? Will it be a generally available API, or do they lock it down and use this as a stick to make people stop leaving the Mac App Store? I just don't have an easy time being optimistic about this, given where their priorities lie lately.
[1] Parse a Spotify response as a dictionary: https://workflow.is/workflows/1da14413405c4dcaa83904c2fe5cc3...
It was a mercy killing. AppleScript and Automator had become too complicated and obscure to be worthwhile anymore.