Regexes are perfectly fine. Awful implementations that accept patterns that aren't regular expressions without complaint and provide little to no tools to look

Regexes are perfectly fine. Awful implementations that accept patterns that aren't regular expressions without complaint and provide little to no tools to look at underlying automata or to step through them during execution are the problem. It's quite an amazing problem to have honestly because it really shouldn't be a problem to create a proper implementation. You can learn the theory behind regular expression in a few hours and know pretty much everything there is to know.