Business Process/Activity Based Workflow vs Push Notification

TLDR: is there a full "replacement" for Business/Process Activity Based Workflow?

PeopleTools provides the ability to directly create actionable PUSH notifications via PTPN_PUBLISH, and AWE lets you track action required in an approval process (this latter one still uses Business Process/Activity Based Workflow behind the scenes).

The advantage of the old-style Business/Process Activity Based Workflow (which is done in application designer) is that it allows you to visually describe the steps in a process, and then w/out separate coding generate emails, worklist entries, and push notifications.

Is the current approach Oracle/customers use is to just manually implement all of that, by manually coding Push generation, email generation? It seems like extra work, and loses the benefit of a single worklist users can look at to see all of their pending "work" (approvals or anything).