I agree that devs (and everyone else) are fundamentally lazy. I don't agree with the scared. People would rather spend time on things that bring them joy, and that thing which made them excited to work with Company X might be no more, or a whole other thing altogether, 6 months later. But they still need that paycheck, so they do what they can to offset the increasing pain and displeasure so they can continue.

The characterization of visual workflow tools is also an incidental affair: there are commercial tools, and there are open source tools. Just depends on the kind of support one wants, and many devs would love some decent support when some component breaks or something's missing, hence the more likely adoption of a commercial solution.

And in the end it's also just the next evolution of software development tools that's being sought. We moved from flipping switches, to boxes of punch cards, to Assembly, to C-like, to Python-like. We're looking for the next form, and 2-D node-like programming does seem an improvement over 1-D text, as text was an improvement over reams of punched paper. And there will always be those who continue to enjoy doing Assembly, even though the majority moved on to higher level languages, which will also be the case for the current and next level tools.