Both can be, and are, true. The Visual Editor works better now for its designed purpose than it did before, and rewriting Parsoid in PHP made it easier to depl

Both can be, and are, true. The Visual Editor works better now for its designed purpose than it did before, and rewriting Parsoid in PHP made it easier to deploy and maintain across projects (and in general Mediawiki). For editing text and non-templated content, which is the bulk of the work and the entry point for new contributors, it's matured into a useful tool. The Visual Editor was also designed around English and European Wikipedia usage, and it still causes problems for other Wikipedia languages and for Wikimedia projects outside of Wikipedia. It has strong built-in opinions about the usage and design of skins and templates that other Wikimedia projects disagreed with. And it's still frustrating as tech, both in bugs and by design, and especially when used in situations where wikitext editing is still common or required. It has caching and session bugs that either don't affect or aren't as destructive to other editing tools, or even pre-PHP Parsoid versions of VE. It still makes unnecessary wikitext changes — and arbitrary, if you weren't in the discussions where they were implemented or closed out as Won't Fix — to formatting and templates based on its own strong opinions. It breaks completely on interwiki redirects, a bigger problem for projects outside of Wikipedia than inside of it. It's a useful, arguably invaluable, tool for new contributors that was badly designed at launch, has improved since, but is still fundamentally incompatible with many use cases into which it's been forced.