And to be explicit: It looks like InnoDB is ACID compliant and crash consistent, so indeed this criticism appears out of date. Thanks for correcting me.

Yep, and even before 5.5, InnoBD was present (since the early 2000's IIRC), and is what most people chose to use for any production level deployment (MyISAM never even supported transactions, so people had to use something different when they got serious), it just wasn't the default engine until that point so you had to specify it in your create table statement or use a config setting to change the default.

MySQL 3.x was mostly just okay for simple website that didn't do much. (MyISAM is good for either extremely read heavy with few writes or vice versa, was very performant in those cases for the time)

MySQL 4.x added subquery support and InnoDB as a standard component, even if not the default.

MySQL 5.0 added cursors, triggers, stored procedures, views.

I think from about this point MySQL was fairly usable in place of some enterprise DB's depending on use case, and most of the essential features were there, even if not always the default.

MySQL started as a super easy to use and accessible DB, and slowly accreted enough enterprise level features to be able to compete in that field, but it's been in use successfully there for quite a while.

In comparison, my (super limited and possibly incorrect) understanding of Postgres's history is that they focused on stability and enterprise level features first, and then later added some things for more convenience. I think they aren't super different in capabilities now, at least for the core functionality most expect.