From out of nowhere it jumps into a list of problems with cron being cron. I kind of see your point.

I think looking at the discussions here is even more surreal.

Airflow, Prefect, Dagster, Kedro,... it appears there are now a lot of tools that I never heard of and never needed, despite me doing exactly what all of them try to solve with Hadoop and MapReduce.

Hadoop? MapReduce? Never heard of those and sound crazy. I solve my data problems just using unix tools.

Airflow is analogous to Oozie in the Hadoop ecosystem.

Thanks for clarifying :)

I introduced Airflow to replace a precarious collection of cronned scripts in our ETL workflows and have never looked back.

The ability to rerun a failed DAG from a given task was ideal for the situation we found ourselves in at the time with a dependency on a Hadoop cluster that was starting to fail.