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]
(although [per Wikipedia] the first Scratch prototype does seem to predate Automator by 1.5 years, so I suppose it’s possible there’s a connection)