All the documentation I spotted currently still lists evolve as "experimental", and that doesn't help with any confidence of which tools/extensions to use in day-to-day operations, on top of how scattered the documentation is. It is interesting, perhaps how hg has a better UI, but git has always had arguably more consistent documentation.
(Similar too, both hg and git are built as sets of "plugins" to the core CLI but hg requires much more explicit installation and git just bundled a lot of them directly together and implicitly runs anything that even looks close [any script in the PATH that fits git-command may be run for git command], making it less clear which hg commands to use despite the better general UI, and easier to get started in git with a smorgasbord of commands.)
I somewhat remember the Named Branches versus Bookmarks discussion/confusion thing from the last time I attempted to use hg. It sounds unfortunate that it still doesn't seem very well documented or well explained this many years later.
I believe it is bug free, and fit for real world usage, and has been for years. If you read the details, the issue is there is a chance for performance degradation, and they consider that as "backward incompatible".
I believe those have been deprecated in favor of the evolve extension.
Mercurial is my goto for version control. However, in my experience, the information on the ideal tools/extensions is very scattered. The Mercurial book is 10 years old! For example, few mercurial users make use of branches for throwaway work - they use bookmarks. But how is a new user supposed to know that?