I think most of the critique is coming from the people that made their mind up already or used only GPT-3.5 in the past.

Then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: a) "ChatGPT is stupid! Also, plagiarism! No value!" b) " I wrote a carelessly bad prompt and it responded with a seemingly bad answer!" c) " This confirms my biases!"

I find that when I provide it with enough context and a set of requirements (as I would with a non-AI engineer), it's very good at problem solving.