I like it because it's a good way to cook things I might not decide to make otherwise.
Complaint #2 makes no sense to me. You add all your own salt. If they want less salt, add less salt.
So imagine I want to cook some chicken breasts. I'm going to dry them and the season them and let them sit for awhile. Then I will cook them and finish them. If I want to make a sauce from the nice remains of the pan they were cooked in I'd remove the chicken and excess oil perhaps and begin that process. And that process has many steps from adding shallots and garlic to deglazing with wine perhaps and reducing that and then adding stock and reducing and then mixing in some butter. The very last thing I'd do is season.
If I'm going to put the sauce on the plate and there is a starch there's a good chance I won't have to season those much at all as the sauce will carry that.
New cooks tend to over season. They forget that if everything you're cooking has salt on it when someone eats one thing there will be salt left on their tongue and in their mouth. This will help the next they thing eat and it won't need as much salt.
In general anything like a stew or a sauce should be seasons as late as possible even if there are many steps in creating it. Meat should be seasoned early and left to rest so excess moisture can be taken out of the surface areas of the meat to help form a better surface texture and flavor.
You might add a little salt in intermediary steps because the sodium will play a role in the cooking process. But those aren't "to taste" and usually you'd only need very little.
I totally get that it's not for everyone but honestly for me it's been a pretty huge life improvement. They have one of my absolute favorite products.
I'm honestly a pretty big fanboy. Happy to chat. Also happy to hand out free weeks to anyone who wants to try it out. Just DM me your email + real name on twitter.
The waste thing is definitely legit though.
We have a small child so restaurants can be challenging, but to us it feels like the time and effort spent preparing and cleaning up are comparable to the whole restaurant ordeal, and only a little bit more intensive than the take-away process. It's more "work" but the shared meal preparation ritual is a time honored tradition that really does feel like it promotes bonding in a positive way.
The main advantage over shopping for ingredients is that we get reasonable variation and good portion sizes without spending any time planning or shopping. We've also learned a number of new techniques for rounding out meals and balancing flavors from the Blue Apron patterns that help when cooking "freestyle."
I would probably even pay a little more (but probably not much) for a more localized version that produced less trash and minimized how far my food traveled to my plate, but it would have to be just as convenient and "everything included" as Blue Apron is.
The only thing we wish it had is support for dietary restrictions--my wife has celiac's and we have to work around that sometimes.