It's unfortunate that the sales pitch of no-code has focused so heavily on "cut the IT team out and just let the business folks write their own apps!" because I don't think that this is a good path. As someone who has been highly involved in the no/low code ecosystem for 15 years, every time I see this play out the results have been a mess (and it sounds like we agree).

The real win with these tools is to give them to a competent development team and let them move faster and spend less time worrying about unimportant things.

No/low code doesn't remove the need for good UI/UX design, data modeling, proper handling around security and access, etc. It just makes these things a lot easier, like selecting which app roles can view a DB column vs. checking before running the SQL in hand-written code, or having visual theme editors instead of having to write CSS by hand, and so on.

I think when vendors claim this citizen development story or push it as the way of the future they shoot themselves in the foot... not only are they signing themselves up for a client list who needs a lot more support than their business model can handle, but they tarnish their reputation and the ecosystem's reputation, and make everyone look bad. "Yeah, we tried QuickBase 5 years ago, it was terrible, Bob in Accounting made a customer payment portal and hackers stole the credit card numbers of all of our clients and it cost us $10m to clean up the mess, why would be try PowerApps after that experience?"

J.Ja