I use nodes in Blender and it’s a good way of creating complex materials etc. In general though I think it’s to complex for image editing. The Blender workflow is quite different and the materials etc are re used more frequently or apply to a larger (time wise) piece of work where the investment in time and headspace nodes require are worth it.
Saying that you could of course have hud style nodes that you activate by clicking in the layer list and the nodes will be displayed over the image with visual feedback on the canvas as you change the nodes.
For my use case there will only be one or three boxes per layer though I don’t think it ever gets blender level in practice. With this low complexity of the controls the high complexity of the ui can become counterproductive.