Boq sells itself the wrong way. Yeah the "nodes" terminology is misleading and never explained well. The real point of Boq is to just run your stuff, and as a consequence you have to use its stupid code framework for some reason, even though those are totally unrelated things. But in the end, that only affects like 1% of the code, i.e. you wrap your stuff at the highest level with something that gives the dependencies instead of them coming from a "main" file. Those who can swallow their coding pride end up saving a ton of headache having something deal with all the production stuff for them.
Pod seems to only be the "just run your stuff" part on paper, which would be nice, only problem is it sucks. Every little thing you want to do is a huge codelab, and it's less supported. So people default to Boq instead.