Absolutely!
I’ve nothing against NodeRed as such, I just have concerns about it’s scalability.
If you’re dealing with a few dozen messages an hour, then it’s perfect for drag-and-drop “glue” to link components together, but once you start to get above a few hundred messages a minute then I’d be concerned about the performance.
Admittedly, I’ve not tried it in a while and it may have improved, but both the IBM-hosted version and a self-hosted version felt a lot slower compared with a 100-line python script when I used them.
As @mstenta says though, there’s no reason we can’t have both, and if we were to “standardise” on something like MQTT as the protocol, then it makes it easy to swap either option in as necessary.