I believe the writer is comparing local visual workflow programs against local Excel workbooks, that is: personal productivity tools run on a users local machine. This is a very important distinction.
The value prop of these "Low-Code No-Code" platforms has absolutely 0 to do with the actual "user/developer" experience being better/easier/more powerful and everything to do with the orchestration, inheritability, visibility, management, and security capabilities that these platforms provide. If I have 5 artisanal, bespoke Excel workbooks that my "developer" accountant runs locally to complete a part of a critical business process (and they invariably do) then I have 5 ways my business can come to a grinding halt when any number of things happens to that accountant or their computer. I would take 50 less powerful, rickety RPA workflows that I can at least see in a control room over those 5 Excel workbooks any day of the week.
Yes, absolutely.
The reason why my startup uses Zapier isn't because we prefer to use no-code to orchestrate this specific workflow. It's because it's faster than building out all the webhooks, routers, integrations, tables, etc necessary to make this workflow work, stuff that Zapier already natively supports
I would highly recommend looking into n8n if you're digging Zapier.