Lots of the comments here seem to be commenting on their own experiences of complexity and frustration with Airflow, but I'd venture to say that's most data orchestration tools. In fact, that sort of feedback is so consistent that I'm half tempted to start a podcast for "orchestration horror stories" (contact if interested).

What I've found while building out Shipyard, a hosted lightweight orchestration platform, is that teams want something that "just works". Servers that "just scale". Observability that doesn't require digging. Notifications and retries that work automatically. Workflows that don't mix business logic with platform logic. Code and workflows that sync with git. Deployment that only takes a few minutes.

For the straightforward use cases, where you need to run tasks A -> G daily, with a bit of branching logic, Airflow is overkill. Yes, Airflow has a lot of great complex functionality that can help you down the road. But Airflow keeps getting suggested to everyone even if it's not best suited to their use case, resulting in lots of lost time and engineering overhead.

While I have definitely have bias, there are a lot of other high quality alternatives out there to explore nowadays!