That should get you to a point where you can at least ask for a particular clarification.
That others can connect to securely. So long as you can connect to the tor network you don't need to worry about firewalls.
One criticism is that while onion addresses are secure and have authentication built in (it's kind of like if websites could be connected to by the public key of their SSL certificate) they are hard for humans to compare.
The problem is chicken and egg you have to connect over SSL using DNS to get the onion address if one is advertised.
So the first time you access it you just assume it's trust worthy. "Trust on first use" TOFU.
[0] the BBC for example advertises it's address https://www.bbcweb3hytmzhn5d532owbu6oqadra5z3ar726vq5kgwwn6a... here https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50150981.amp but getting it requires accessing the regular website first.
That's not an issue of Tor. The same thing happens in the clear web, how do you know www.bbc.com is the BBC you trust from the TV?.
That happens to any domain, in fact, that happens to any source of information.
How did you start trusting in your current religion or politics?. Chances are that you were convinced by a source(s) that for some reason you previously decided to relied and trust.
We build some kind of web-of-trust in our heads, and it's normal that we do not trust in any .onion address initially. Eventually we import trust from sources outside of Tor that we currently trust (like you did by getting bbc's .onion address from its website), and then we start adding some .onion addresses to our "trusted sources" list
I suppose your criticism is that last step of adding that .onion address to your trusted sources is really painful. It's easy to remember www.bbc.com, but not its .onion address. We eventually need to automate this, something like password managers but for trusted sources
I do like that website can know advertise an onion address the browser can highlight.
People used to rely on Grams before it went out of business.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grams_(search)
Or DeepDotNet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepDotWeb
Presumably once Reddit closed /r/darknetmarkets discussion moved to forums or probably Discord.
Back in the late 90s my local car boot sale (like a jumble sale), sometimes sold lists of websites. I never really knew what was on them but it feels a bit like what we're back to now.
With an onion site on Tor they would not be able to do so easily.
But hopefully if they were running an onion site and not any regular site, they would mention their onion address frequently on their TV channel, and that way many people would know the real address.
The most reliable solution is to type the business name into Google if you remember to skip the scam ads. Google doesn't track Tor, though.
I wouldn't call Tor a secure alternative to DNS, though. First of all, DNSSEC is easy to set up on a domain or in your DNS resolver settings if you care about such things (even if the underlying protocol is kinda shit), and second of all there's no way to know if hackernewsfjsushfoufbeldufbfof.onion is the real service or if you need to go to hackernewsfkfhfofusnsodifnekdj.onion; you can bookmark one and hope it's the official source, but it's basically TOFU for domains. You could use the special onion location header to specify the real onion address, but then you're back to trusting DNS again.