Shortcuts is indeed the (more than spiritual) successor to Automator. Scratch was pretty famous in interface design circles in the early 2000s (it was a pretty high profile MIT Media Lab project). I'm sure the Automator developers were aware of it, but it may also have been a case of both having a rich neighbour [1]. Agentsheets, for example, predates both by over 10 years [2]

[1] https://folklore.org/A_Rich_Neighbor_Named_Xerox.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AgentSheets