What you're missing is that for much of enterprise software before Airflow, everything was steaming rubbish.

Airflow is... not amazing. But by the standards of horrible enterprise software we've all been subjected to, it's not that bad.

If you're complaining about Airflow, wait for the day you're forced to use an internally built database client.

That's Afghanistan.

Our proprietary AWS wrapper takes 45 damn minutes on a good day to allocate a VM. The AMI is built in two minutes. TWO.

I'm sure in 5 years Dagster and Prefect will have improved gradually in lots of incremental ways. For now Airflow is pretty solid.