Not sure what you mean by "BI/data science architecture" but Airflow is essentially a scheduler and orchestrator for data processing jobs.

These activities are usually managed by cron and more often by advanced scheduler tools (depending on the vendor), so it's quite a core part of any architecture that needs to e.g. load/reload/refresh data periodically.

If the requirement is simply to connect notebooks to a data lake, then the only scheduling required is to load the data lake, and something like Airflow may be overkill for this, depending on what/how the data is processed and loaded.