I am not disqualifying it because it’s code-CAD. (I think it’s a bad language design but that is a total aside)

CadQuery, Build123D, Featurescript etc. all have something OpenSCAD does not have: they all have facilities to operate on generated geometry such as edges, faces and vertices. So they have generalisable operations, and they can output pure geometry representations as STEP/IGES. Featurescript presumably also allows access to sketch constraints. (Build123D is beginning to add those I think.)

These are the things I think are necessary to “aid” design, because they are the things that begin to abstract away the mathematics. OpenSCAD never does. So it “aids” design little more than any pixel graphics library aids 3D software developers.

And it does not, in fact, create precise 3D models! It produces mesh representations of them. So it cannot, by definition, produce a precise representation of a cylinder, sphere, cone or curve.

The 3D models from OpenSCAD are not highly manufacturable at all, except with additive production techniques. STLs do not make good inputs for a CNC (nobody will tell you that is good engineering practice).