Having said that, it did great things to bring together the community and kill the fragmented landscape of robotics. (Does anyone remember the 2000s-2010s and all the custom, proprietary robot abstraction layers that were built up? Awful.). Clearpath and a number of small vendors partnered well with ROS, pushing the BS off the stage.
But it hasn't aged well ...
The messaging and logging is the only useful component (for me / my teams). The codebases / nodes are abysmally intertwined, over cohesive, and lack a nice unixy modular architecture that I'd expect with something built on top of a message passing layer. The central point of failure is often a very real point of failure in spotty networking environments (dropping from wifi can kill your whole stack, even if all messages are local machine only)
DDS is nice, but everyone serious is pretty much already using it (mil / aero), esp because of shared memory transport. So it's great that they were dragged forward ... but it doesn't quite feel like the big leap that ROS 1.0 was.
I find this sentiment among most researchers and industry people I've talked to at IROS and ICRA. I always make a point to ask what they like about ROS when I find out they're using it and probably 95% of the time the top 2 answers are the message transport layer and rviz (the visualization tool). tf (the frame of reference graph) is sometimes in the top 2, but it's also been a complete pain for me (and others, so much that there are 2 competing versions: tf and tf2) and would be in my bottom 2 features. The rest of it I find most people say they could do without.
ROS is a packaging system for academic robotics software with a message passing layer. It was created by hammering a huge collection of existing software into talking a common protocol. The ROS people also made the distribution buildable as a whole (more or less; it's notorious for breaking due to version pinning problems.) Just having some kind of standard was a big win. It beats downloading multiple pieces of academic software and trying to bash it into cooperating.
I've used ROS and contributed to ROS in a minor way, but I don't like it.