I have not put much thought into it in terms of comparison, but in Houdini I never felt like it’s a mental burden to keep track of attributes. In Blender, it feels that way all the time. I have to constantly type attribute names again from scratch into every new node I make, and I need to constantly keep list of all the intermediate names I had to make up for them to do even the most basic of math operations. In Houdini, I don’t have to.
While the design may be similar in some ways, it’s different enough to make the GN experience dreadful while the Houdini experience not.