Tower/AWX are bad products and they should feel bad. It’s actually easier to run Ansible via any CI system than it is to use Tower. I get what the devs are trying to do but Tower wants to own so much of the process that it’s basically not Ansible anymore. You pretty much have to write your code specifically for Tower (which means a total rewrite in mosts shops because who starts with Tower?)
That type of criticism is a bit broad. While it has all the hallmarks of a commercial product trying to fit every type of customer, on the other hand the whole point is having a centralized architecture for Ansible. This is something desirable as soon as you outgrow using it for ad-hoc jobs, and there is a payoff compared to just scripting in bash or dockerfiles. Of course the code has to be adapter for it, but it's not anything like a complete rewrite.
