(And have been eagerly waiting for this moment for ages)
It just seems “unscientific” to just use Photoshop and above all curious about the set of rules and algorithms, that enables them to decide which hue to pick for which region, levels, etc.
Photoshop can do just about anything with spatial image data and if it's not built-in, you can probably find a plug-in to do what you want or write a script. The trade-off is the software can be very complex because over the decades it's grown to support an incredible number of use cases.
Over the years I've also seen PS used in unexpected ways at work. If you need to do something programmatic to image or spatial data, PS is a good host platform for custom code because it will handle importing file formats, color space conversion, bit plane manipulation, alignment, scaling, cropping, perspective correction and masking before your custom processing and then it'll export the output in whatever sizes and formats you need. And it will do it on gigapixel data sets under script control. That's a lot of grunt work you don't have to implement. I've even seen it wired up to Matlab.
But when you have 10k x 5k pixel images and channels that don’t directly correlate with visual spectrum I don’t see why using photoshop extensively is wrong especially for images to be released to the general public. I’m even sure some local touch up is acceptable for me.
These color composite images really show off how awesome JWST is. They're meant for the public to enjoy (astronomers enjoy them too).
This article goes through processing a Hubble image of one of the same objects that Webb did today and includes an example of what it looks like before adjusting for contrast and tone.
https://www.rocketstem.org/2015/04/20/how-astronomers-proces...
There's a bit on the data policy on wikipedia [1] but basically the operations costs are funded (in part) by people paying for telescope time. The project that is currently paying for the telescope gets exclusive access for a 1 year "embargo" period, after which the data becomes public.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope#Gro...