I think Wordpress is a great example. I recently tried making a simple website using Wordpress's visual layout editor, and it was absolute hell. The process consists of fighting with unlabeled icons, convoluted UI state that is controlled by mouse movements apparently, shit jumping around all over the place when you add/remove stuff, and a ton of other terrible UX decisions. It felt like I was trying to perform a satanic ritual with my mouse.

I'm not a front end guy, but I was able to write exactly what I wanted directly in HTML/CSS in around 2-3 hours. That's for a static site with responsive layout and like 3 pages.

Could someone who is actually in expert in Wordpress's editor do this in less than 3 hours? No doubt. But at the end of the day, all it cost me to build a vastly superior solution was a few hours (and again, I'm not an expert at frontend stuff at all, so that was not as fast as it could be done). Instead of having to host a bloated Wordpress site now, I just need to serve a few static HTML/CSS files, which can be done for free nowadays with a lot of providers.

So the no code solution is more expensive to operate, and less efficient/performant. But at the same time, it doesn't require an expensive developer (even if an actual front-end dev would only need 1 billable hour at most)

I would suggest that they are more akin to "control panels," on complex machinery.

Even "control panels," require a lot of training, for complex enough machinery.

However, a great place to see well-written PHP, is inside the WordPress stack.

Good point. Not too different to the application surface of AI where nocode is similiar to general AI but instead of aiming for that we're now learning to scope down to expert systems to see real gains.

The difference is that Shopify and Wordpress are for well-defined solutions (shopping, blogs, landing pages), but are NOT viable for custom software applications.