ControlNet was a stepwise improvment when in being able to generate a character in a specific pose as compared to trying to coax SD into giving you an approximation of what you wanted through Prompt Engineering.

People training and releasing custom models that can replace entire workflows of disparate steps needed to produce an image that would normally result from that workflow.

There was that video or maybe it was an article where the guy made it so he could just use natural language to describe the edits he wanted made and it would make them etc.