I say that in a good way.
Lotus Notes was the first no-code system for developing networked/people/workgroup oriented systems.
Notes lost its way, but Airtable has extracted the essential essence of the Notes client and done an amazing job of making it work.
Airtable is worth checking out in detail because it's implemented extremely well with great attention to detail and beautiful solutions to thorny UI problems.
I suspect not because it looks like the founders are too young to have even used Notes - my guess is this is a clean reinvention.
People loved or hated Notes.
It was way, way ahead of its time. It was really the very first system that integrated the concept or networking, users, groups, a replicated database, nosql unstructured data, form building and in built security with a sophisticated GUI.
I think it was great if you had departmental developers building stuff, but I hated not being able to make my own forms. And I hated having to open up Notes in 2010 to click a procurement button or a timesheet button. If it was web-based (or had an api) I could have just scripted requests to do the same thing.