When do you need a structured database with many collaborators?
Airtable and the like strike me as a database tool for dummies who want 'anyone change anything anytime', which is just a recipe for no one knowing who the hell is changing what and when anymore.
Businesses change fast and don't always have internal development resources to create an application to do this sort of thing.
Airtable allows me to define arbitrary fields for the Kanban cards, which happens to be a premium/paid feature in all the actual Kanban saas tools (Trello, etc).
We're an academic research lab that also happens to do contractual work for other labs (mostly internal to the university), mostly designing and building mechanical prototypes and testbeds for other researchers.
It took like 5 minutes to set up an airtable base to track our WIP and all information we use for billing our "customers": hours, material purchased, internal budget reference, etc.