In my last job I used to work with a major vendor (in industrial manufacturing) who provided a Cloud+Edge Integration solution for factories. The Edge portion

In my last job I used to work with a major vendor (in industrial manufacturing) who provided a Cloud+Edge Integration solution for factories. The Edge portion was a Industrial PC with a software layer that basically allowed you to deploy stuff developed in the "Cloud" to the Edge PC. One of the OOTB things on the Edge stack was a customized version Node-Red. It was one of the most popular components for customers and used a lot in factories. Yes, it's true that you don't want to use it as the thing that connects your industrial controller/PLC to a Python script (running in a container on the Edge PC) that decides if a machine should be turned off for safety reasons. But there are a lot of use cases if you think about it as a low/no-code development environment for streaming data. It provides a way to automate a lot of boring manual processes around data. Being able to use Javascript code snippets also means a lot of developers have an easy way to deploy small blocks of codes. It's easier to learn JavaScript than trying to figure out something with a PLC or a SCADA system. The dashboarding was also pretty nice - especially compared to the Dashboards you'd see on a machine HMI (basically a touchscreen that controls a machine). It wasn't perfect of course. If your sensor data is streaming at 1Khz you'd need to use something else. But the data from a lot of factories is a lot more mundane than that. And a lot of fancy factories have mundane things they need done simply and quickly.