I can't help but think that this isn't a very well thought out criticism. I'll go through each of them and spell out why I think this critique doesn't hold any weight. Let me start by saying that I use IBM Cloud and I've switched to IBM Cloud from AWS.

1. There are several IBM Cloud pages—and they’re all talking about different things
--it's pretty easy to find the right IBM Cloud address and honestly, anyone that can't find https://cloud.ibm.com probably isn't qualified to provide a review.

2. During signup, the user experience is… lacking
--If you can't figure out how to enter a password into a box then it's probably best to go back to elementary school or kindergarten to work on the basics. Pretty much any autogenerated password gets accepted--I have 3 separate IBM Cloud accounts and I've never had a single issue figuring out how to set my password when registering. if 20% of your criticism of IBM's cloud offering is based on this issue then you're already grasping at straws.

3. Privacy notices—who needs ‘em?
I'm not sure exactly what the criticism is here other than this notice wasn't updated after CA adopted new legislation. You didn't state why they are non-compliant or what your actual issue is. I'd suggest you do a better job of spelling out what the actual issue is vs. making weak arguments. I've now addressed 60% of your argument and nothing actually has to do with the cloud offering--it seems you couldn't figure out how to actually set up a cloud account based on your own arguments--SAD!

4. The onboarding experience is. . .also lacking:
"Whoever designed this needs to be put on a PIP. Services are sorted alphabetically, and there’s no guided onboarding. Language like this—Want to spin up a VM / storage bucket / toilet in which to drown yourself? Start here!—is always useful.
Next, we learn that “Lite” and free are two different things. We also are given two compute options:
Container Registry
Cloud Foundry

Either IBM or I have no clue what a “Cloud Foundry” is; it could really go either way and at this point I’m too scared to ask."

--Based on your lack of cohesive arguments so far, I'm going to guess that you actually have no semblance of an idea about what you are talking about. If you're a user of Cloud Foundry PaaS then I suspect you don't know much about it. IBM has been a provider of Cloud Foundry PaaS for several years and it's actually quite simple to use and also fairly well documented. Not doing your homework and making meritless judgements about a cloud provider isn't winning you friends or helping you to influence people. I'd suggest you spend some time getting familiar with the site and actually trying to explore the offerings instead of making ridiculous observations about a platform you have obviously never used. By comparison, I find that AWS interface to be very cluttered and not very well laid out--but maybe that's just me. I quite like the IBM Carbon Design interface libraries... so much so that I use them in my own web/interface development projects--they are very clean and offer a well thought out look and feel. 4/5 of your complains have held no water and do not actually address the cloud offering--I can't help but think you are in some way biased or unqualified to offer a review at this point. Also, if you couldn't figure out that the "Lite" plan is free to use then I think you should probably revisit my critique from comment number 2.

5. As for using the actual services? Yikes.
--at this point you've fully disgraced your self and rendered your own critique to be worthless. One of the key elements of the IBM Cloud is that it's extremely configurable. You can spin up any number of linux boxes with Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, RedHat or bring your own image. Not only is IBM more configurable and more aligned to open source, but it's also more performant across number of key features--they dominate lower, general and high intensity workload performance benchmarks for IOPS, Throughput and HA/Durability across block and file storage offerings. In terms of performance for compute, if you use a standard unix bench script (https://github.com/kdlucas/byte-unixbench.git) you will find that
the price to performance comparison is also favorable to IBM's VM's vs their peers. I've not run these tests for a year or so but the last I checked IBM had a better price to performance value vs both AWS and MSFT (I didn't check for google) for both bare metal and virtual servers when testing on CentOS. Nothing you've said really holds much weight and pretty much every observation you've made here was cursory. I think it would do you well to spend some additional time to actually understand how the offering differs and why it may be a better product or not for your particular use case.

I don't expect that everyone will fall in love with IBM Cloud but I think they have a pretty solid offering and it continues to improve at a rapid pace. I moved away from AWS a few years back and while I was happy with my AWS IaaS, I find that I like the IBM offering more. Just my $0.02.