For context, I used Datastage, Informatica, Ab Initio and SSIS in previous lives an went on to write the first version of Airflow. I developed a taste for pipelines-as-code while working at Facebook using an internal tool that is not open source.

I'd argue that pipelines as code, as opposed to dragndrop GUIs, is a better approach, at least for people who are comfortable writing code. Code is easy to version, test, diff, collaborate and allows for the creation of arbitrary abstractions.