I would like to recreate an example of some nice data wrangling / data cleaning user experience based loosely on programming by demonstration. The classic reference for things like this I know of is Wrangler (https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/1978942.1979444). Are there nicer newer things I should be looking at?

Not sure about “data wrangling” per se, but Ultorg (fka SIEUFERD) is a very well-developed interface for reshaping / querying relational data by demonstration. One of its papers has this nice listing of related systems, including Wrangler, some of which may be relevant to you.

Thanks! This looks super interesting - I was thinking and searching along the lines of "data science", but I completely missed all the work around relational data querying, even though that is exactly what I was looking for. This is a super interesting paper and the references in the literature are fantastic too. The other interesting thing I cam across in the meantime is Wrex (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3313831.3376442) - which is "by example" (not so much "by demonstration") but it has a really nice ability to then turn your interactively created transformations into a code cell in a notebook.

Wrangler appears to have completed it's evolution into corporate SaaS https://www.alteryx.com/about-us/trifacta-is-now-alteryx-designer-cloud 😞