Yeah I'm a dev but was a team of one embedded within a sales and marketing org at a a medium-large size startup with a mandate to automate and find growth hacks for sales + marketing, and I was able to use Zapier with its Salesforce integration, google sheets integration, Twilio integration, Marketo integration to do a lot of work that I wouldn't have had time to build, support, and do maintenance on if I'd built a full backend application.
All of what I did with Zapier could have been implemented with a database, a bunch of scripting, and cronjobs, but using Zapier saved oodles of time and meant I was outsourcing the maintenance to their API integrators rather than to myself.
I was able to do so much with triggers and webhooks I can only imagine what is possible now with their more recent code blocks feature and adding better environment variables.