I think a crud app is great for "directing" the user through the common changes they will make to the data, like approving a document by clicking a button for example. But a simple tabular view of your data is really great too if you can get away with it. Sometimes it's not that useful, if for example the data is hundreds or thousands of columns wide.

I think that's why something like airtable is great. It gives you the best of both worlds. All the data is backed by a simple spreadsheet, and it has an API so you can create the more custom UIs to help direct users with common tasks.