In a company with huge numbers of developers I'd agree with you, it's better to have something you control than a vendor specific thing that's likely to cause p

In a company with huge numbers of developers I'd agree with you, it's better to have something you control than a vendor specific thing that's likely to cause problems. For a smaller company with limited availability and a long backlog of features to implement that's not the choice being made though, the choice being made is "do we implement this feature or not", and a tool like AppFlow lowers the cost of development on certain features, likely resulting in at least some things that wouldn't have happened because they'd require a larger investment of time than people were willing to put in.