Really good points! I don't think that Airflow is necessarily a problem if your data engineering team knows how to best use Airflow Operators, Hooks and DAGs for incremental loads. But because Airflow is not an opinionated ETL/ELT tool, most often I see a lot of custom code that could be improved...

You know there is this "data mesh" hype now. I think the idea behind is to empower data consumers within the company (data analysts) who know best the data to create and maintain the models. That's easier said than done, and most often turns out into a worst situation than when is only data engineers who can model data... I've only heard of Zalando who has successfully distributed data ownership within the company.