Visual scripting as an aid to designers has been a thing for a long time in commercial game engines. For example Unreal Engine has had visual scripting to aid l

Visual scripting as an aid to designers has been a thing for a long time in commercial game engines. For example Unreal Engine has had visual scripting to aid level design and shader creation for quite a long time. It's definitely less efficient than text if you're already an experienced programmer but its also more discoverable and intuitive to understand for a lot of people that aren't. It's also nice to play with in a way that pedantic text syntax isn't. They're also really nice for processes where you can inspect the results so far at each stage (shaders, procedural texture generation, solid modelling). It's not really about raw programming efficiency but efficiency to get the job done, it empowers people other than dedicated programmers to do their jobs without having to sit around waiting for a programmer to do something for them which is very important in terms of iterating on concepts.