I know there's a smaller but vocal group in tech that openly attacks LaTeX, e.g. "LaTeX considered harmful". While I don't completely agree with them, but I think there are some legitimate and genuine criticisms here.

Personally, I find LaTeX is great due to its native programmability - it facilitates a natural separation of content and presentation, combined with its markup language, can be very powerful. It also enables extensibility - community packages for almost every single type of content, e.g. organic chemistry, Feynman diagram, even music. A typical user only needs to \usepackage and stop worrying. It's CTAN ecosystem is just like a programming language like Perl, or recently, Node.js or Go, which is great.

But I find all hell breaks loose when you want to get a slightly different formatting than what's offered. Then suddenly the entire system becomes something you need to fight against. Previously, you could be a happy \usepackage code monkey, but now you need to know the system inside-out and hack a path ahead. Just like what happens when you use a software library in a slightly different way than the author expected, then suddenly you find yourself in a battle with the entire library, unfortunately, the same thing occurs in typesetting...

For example, with LaTeX you can add footnotes to essentially anywhere with guaranteed aesthetics. UNLESS you want to add a footnote for your title, then it turns out the existing infrastructure in the "article" template doesn't allow it at all, and you need to define and redefine and undefine some internal macros in your document to implement it, as I learned from https://tex.stackexchange.com/

And all the separation of content and presentation and its benefits ends at this point. It's no longer "what you think is what you get".

The same issue also occurs when you are trying to make a Beamer slideshow, most "environments" in LaTeX are designed for papers, not a slide. For example, when I want to put some images to the slide, often not fits in a "regular" geometric position, I find I have to keep hacking the width and position of the images and keep compiling until the result is acceptable. I don't know if there are better packages for typesetting slideshow, recommendations are welcome.

Another problem I've noticed is the phenomenon of confusing and outdated packages. Often there are more than one package for a specific task, some are old and limited but still used in many documents, others are new, the rest are competing implementations. Old ones are frequently mentioned in the old guides, it works for a while until you have a corner case, then it takes a few attempts before moving to the newer packages. Again, just like programming languages. A recent trend in programming is writing new, cleaner implementations for basic tasks, I don't know if the same thing is happening in the LaTeX community, if it is, I think it would be great.

On the other hand, I've yet to see a word processor which allows users to extend it and automate formatting and typesetting without doing some ugly macros hacked together and written in VBScript. So I see LaTeX as a valuable tool and I'll keep using LaTeX in the foreseeable future.

The final words, having https://tex.stackexchange.com/ is a great contribution to the LaTeX community, just like how https://stackoverflow.com/ helps for programming.