It was never easy as advertised. Novices even had trouble following the tutorials and making significant modifications to them. Basic tasks, as those mentioned, were easier accomplished with Google Sheets. And if they needed more they'd get someone professional to do Apps Script. Hence how I know of their pains.
Disclosure: I worked at a competitor that targets Enterprises, and we were a bit anxious when App Maker came out. Never saw much results in the market though.
As a FinTech company in the Financial Sector, we were big advocates of App-Maker and the Google cloud-services, recommending it to our clients. Not any more, not now, not ever. The reputational damage to Google will be long-lasting as the people affected, will not forget.
If you have any sway in Google, try to offer us a life-line; not a spreadsheet-based / mobile app provider you acquired last week.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2dYVret-Ck
Check it out if you're still into this type of stuff:)...happy to answer questions.
Google bought it recently and, unless the timing is coincidental, perhaps it was as a replacement?
I had somewhat accidentally been a Filemaker consultant for a while before that and saw how far non-programmers could get with a visual schema editor and GUI editor and some light scripting. They often made a mess, so I came into to fix things, but the fact that a small business owner could make a working custom inventory and invoicing tool with absolutely no training beyond the manual was incredible to me.
I'm really saddened by this shut down, for the continued reputation damage that's being done, because it's my baby (and you don't often get to create an entirely new public product at Google), and because I still believe that the world needs more and better tools that allow non- and casual programmers to build software to solve their own problems.