The term for this is “data-flow language” or “visual programming”. Every few years, somebody rediscovers the “visual programming” paradigm, and wonders why it hasn’t taken over the world. As they use it more heavily, they begin to discover the downsides.
Cycles nodes are great, provided you do not make too much use of lower-level arithmetic/logical operations (e.g. “Math” nodes). Once you string lots of those together, things get rapidly out of hand. Case in point: this example of a complex node tree which I tried condensing down to a few lines of OSL code. Which is easier for somebody else to copy?