Re: Massively baffling
Yeah, I saw a glimpse of PowerApps at my last workplace (it wasn't heavily used; the guy that is decided I was gonna poach for the DBA team was trying it out it with no IT experience to actually do things, and that kind of attitude and his interest in how and why SQL worked was immediately a hundred times more valuable to me than any of the schlock I'd read on CVs).
It struck me as a nice idea, but the trouble I've found with anything like that — PowerApps, PowerBI, SSIS, VBA even if Excel wasn't dangerous in its own right — is that for any given source there's a high likelihood that the data is shit. Duplicates, corruption, errors, munges, edge cases — most people have no appreciation for the fact that data needs studying and fixing in order to not provide an exponential cockup downstream. The tools make it very easy to create something dangerous, and often provide no facility to make something safe. A single data person and a single web dev could probably work full-time on all of the "non-critical" stuff in a business delivering what those users need, earmarking stuff for integration into wider processes where appropriate, and save a hell of a lot of money in the long run.
I actually honestly thought that we'd be reaching the point where every young person would be competent enough to be writing decent code now as a result of it being part of their education, but I've seen no evidence of the fact.
"Program without programming" stuff will never work: those people that are techies at heart will spot problems and start wanting to know what's happening one level down, and eventually abandon it in favour of something proper; those who aren't interested in any of that techy nonsense or data-integrity waffle will use it to quietly create mayhem…especially if they're a mangler who decides that their precious little "application" is untouchable.