I don’t know that I’d say SketchUp gets bad press necessarily - if I recall correctly they won a couple awards in 2024 for the Ipad version and the updated 2024 version (which was a SIGNIFICANT performance improvement, btw, that likely took up a lot of resources internally).
I DO think that sometimes fairly and sometimes unfairly, SketchUp gets very vocal critics online (I see it firsthand with a number of comments on my videos).
I think the fair comments in general tend to revolve around more “standard” 3d modeling tools that either aren’t included, or are only included as third party extensions. The lack of a tool that bevels edges would be one such example - it exists in most 3D modeling programs, as well as in paid extension form for SketchUp, but for some reason isn’t a native modeling tool. I think it’s a fair criticism to ask why a user would have to pay for an additional extension to perform a basic task that exists in most other modeling programs.
I started a thread on this discussion late last year (SketchUp Modeling Tool Feature Requests (Modeling Tools Only!)) and I think some of these criticisms are legitimate.
I also think a lot of the Revit users’ criticisms can be valid depending on use case. Revit is much more powerful when it comes to intelligently handling large amounts of building data. A good example would be trying to manage the doors, hardware, and details of a large commercial project with hundreds of doors - SketchUp just isn’t set up to handle that level of data, but it’s not really designed to be. As project size and complexity get bigger, transitioning to these tools makes total sense. The tradeoff there is that on smaller projects, SketchUp offers a lot more flexibility on what can be created.
Personally, I more see these as tools for different use cases 