Oy. Yes there, are legit uses. A few straightforward examples:

1) You implementing something boards (like trello) on mobile. The well-established-in-all-the-apps-that-specialize-in-this behavior is snap scrolling.

2) Tiktok/stories/etc. When you scroll up or right, does it ever land you in between two stories? No. This is the exact behavior.

3) Presentations. Say you are building a presentation tool. The whole point is to define separate slides that are on screen one at a time. This is a very natural and appropriate use of this behavior.

So, yeah, carousels suck. But, this behavior is commonly used and useful in a lot of modern software.

That page is mostly about auto-rotating carousels. Don't do that.

It's also about making your home page a giant carousel, instead of showing multiple things vertically. Don't do that, either.

IMO, one great use for carousels is when you have a product catalog with a bunch of category sections, like Netflix. Each category gets a header, e.g. "Action" "Family" "Romance" "Horror" and each category is a horizontally scrolling list of products, with the next one on the list half-visible on the side, so it's clear that you can scroll it into view.

Scroll snap can be pretty good for that.

Carousels are the modern day <blink> and <marquee> tags. The only difference is that it occasionally has its place with photos, but it's just not optimal for any sort of written content, even if it's just a headline and short description.

nytimes.com uses horizontal carousel on mobile very well, I feel. It's usually for a group of related stories, it's non-intrusive, uses scrolling instead of buttons, and the next story is always partially-visible, which I think is gold-star UI for letting users know it exists.

My understanding is that NY Times spends quite a lot of effort on user metrics, so I would guess, but can't say for sure, that they have evidence that their carousels work.

My clients have large galleries of photos, would you prefer that be paginated?

to a carousel? probably. or infinite scroll, depending on the type of content.

would probably be best to split up the galleries into smaller groupings, though

Yes.

There are plenty of uses for snap scrolling and carousels that aren’t rotating hero images.

See something like https://airbnb.com which uses it for categories a’la the App Store. Image galleries, Netflix-type layouts, etc.

I'm struggling to see how that is different to "rotating hero images". Is it that it doesn't rotate automatically?

What's the UX benefit here?

I get that mobile apps use horizontal swiping and some websites want to be app-like, but even in apps the only common horiztonal-swipe pattern I see is the Android hidden menus pattern, which is (a) a subject of debate in UX circles and (b) absolutely nothing like horizontally scrolling item selection, which is still a bad idea even in native mobile apps.

The other major example I can think of is Instagram's story circles, which I feel must be intentionally unusable to try and force people to view stories in their full-screen tap-to-advance format.

That's a use for sure; though it remains an anti-pattern. Don't mess with the scroll.