I didn't have any contact with the maintainers, but I found node-RED pretty reliable. It was nice to work with, even though I'm not a big fan of Javascript and Node ecosystems. The third-party blocks from their web library did tend to be pretty buggy in my experience. I tried to stay away from them and (re-)implement my own blocks where I needed them.

Perhaps the worst offense was the insecure-by-default config I mentioned in the other comment. I was unknowingly running it on a public port on a dev machine without auth for months before I realized (the network I was on didn't happen to filter inbound connections on ports >1024).

I used Node-RED pretty extensively for controlling experiments (see e.g. https://github.com/avian2/sigfox-toolbox)