jarmitage is a legend (in my eyes), so I'm sure he has his own opinions, but TidalCycles (as it is now known) depends on supercollider for both Midi and Sample playback. It communicates to supercollider through the OSC protocol, so it's conceivable supercollider could/can be swapped out for another engine. As is I think the install a bunch of Haskell stuff + install an editor plugin + install supercollider is the largest blocker to getting folks started with tidal. In the pre-tidalcycles era, Tidal played samples (only afaicr) through its own Dirt sample player which was still a separate process, but included with tidal itself. Now it uses SuperDirt which depends on supercollider.

Compared to PD and max/msp, Tidal is far more focused on the pattern language and the magic that can come out of that. Any 'programming as programming' has to be done with Haskell and loaded in as its own functions. Puredata and max/msp both are full (graphical) programming environments with their own quirks and special tricks, but in a way a bit more like Supercollider in that they can speak midi and do playback inside their own engines (afaik).