An often overlooked framework used by NASA among others is Kedro https://github.com/kedro-org/kedro. Kedro is probably the simplest set of abstractions for building pipelines but it doesn't attempt to kill Airflow. It even has an Airflow plugin that allows it to be used as a DSL for building Airflow pipelines or plug into whichever production orchestration system is needed.
If you are feeling overwhelmed with yet another machine learning pipeline automation framework, you should check out Kedro (https://github.com/quantumblacklabs/kedro).
Kedro has the simplest, leanest, functional-programming inspired pipeline definition and also spits out AirFlow and other formats readily + comes in with an integrated visualisation framework which is stunning & effective.