When the 2015 MacBook came out, nobody knew what a butterfly keyboard was. Nobody had ever tried, felt, or melded with that keyboard. But journalists who got to try it did start hating on it right after the event finished.
Also, the MacBook was an addition to the existing Air + Pro product lines so you could just happily ignore its existence if you didn't like it.
I am a computer professional. I was delighted to get the 2016 MacBook. I imagine plenty, though not all, other professionals also use it -- in fact I see them doing so. I'm also not pompous or insecure enough to feel that there is some sort of magic dividing line between "real" computing folks and mere "consumers".
I must admit I build only small programs with Xcode, doing most of my development in Emacs, doing some compiles locally and much heavy lifting remotely. I have one large simulator that can only run for a few thousand steps locally, but I can happily run it on AWS.
On the other hand it's super-portable, perfectly powerful for the C, C++, Lisp, Java and Rust development I need it for; it runs web browsers, various clients etc perfectly well.
Perhaps if you have to do a lot of image or video editing it wouldn't be enough. It's hard to say, since I used to do editing on a shared 2.5 MIPS mainframe; on the other hand you wouldn't make a modern movie on a MacBook Pro. But you probably write such a program on a machine far less powerful than the users need.