I think the key is to not make everything visual. You want to be able to view your system as you would draw it on a whiteboard. I believe it could be done using a restricted syntax of a proglang.
> Teams I've been close to lately have taken the python pill...
Most people have a desired result and want it as fast as possible.
When imperatively using map, groupBy, filter, you can usually get the immediate result you want very quickly. This is the appeal of Pandas, Python notebooks, etc.
But when someone asks: I want to re-compute on change, which pretty much applies to every task...their quick solution is not optimal.
And then if the schema changes, and you're doing all this intermediary stuff...then refactoring is next to impossible.
Any SQL query could also be written in an imperative prog lang and its probably easier to understand and tweak and also trace. An SQL relation does not maintain any info about its source, which then makes incremental updates difficult, and also refactoring.
You can basically ask the question: for every piece of data you see in your company, can you easily see the "data lineage" from its source and all the transformations it was involved in, and how clean and efficient is this pipeline when receiving new data. Then a step further is, how easy is it to change something.