Fully agreed!

Being a programer I really dislike using Node-RED for complicated calculations as you land up pretty quick into the limitations of "low-code" like version control (some is available in Node-RED but not that good), documentation, other best-practices.

However, for smaller stuff or connecting APIs this is absolutely great as it saves a lot of time around boilerplate stuff like package management, setting up a repo or Docker. We only do this smaller stuff also known as "customer specific configuration" and let our proper programs handle the rest.

Main target group is, like you said similarly, mechanical or industrial engineers with very limited IT knowledge, but still huge process expertise.