National Instruments does not make (tons of) money with LabVIEW licenses. The real dollars are in their hardware offerings, which are very good, but also very expensive.
My experience with the PXI line was that it was absolutely top notch. I’ve seen some really cool things done with that. Most electrical folks I’ve worked with loved the hardware but absolutely despised the price gouging. They were constantly looking for alternatives yet NI hw remained for most things.
The cRIO line.... it’s getting better and it has improved a ton, but in the early beginnings it was extremely buggy, both hw and software.
But even if it's not as complex or interesting as, say, a Keithley electrometer, NI's execution really is top notch. Technical brilliance alone does not a product make.
Definitely LabVIEW has it's strong areas though. Anything to do with more complex UIs is probably not something you want to use LabVIEW for. I'd probably say LabVIEW is definitely strongest when paired with National Instrument's hardware (CompactRIO) which gives you access to data faster than you can do with any other system that I've seen. It's also super easy to develop FPGA applications which is a big plus when working with high-frequency data processing.
Overall I think it fills its niche quite well and don't think it's dissimilar to any other language where you can also make a mess of things if you don't know how to best structure the code.