I personally love Airtable, but I do totally understand some of your points. I also went through quite a bit of testing vaguely similar services before settling on Airtable in large part because of their API.

However, since then Coda has also added an API, which is really interesting. Other folks have mentioned Notion, which is also great, but Coda honestly felt like the closer competitor to Airtable while Notion felt like they were fighting Dropbox Paper.