I am probably one of the junior DS you are referring to. But, I genuinely want to know the reason of using anything other than gradient boost tree to do classification on structured data.
There’s nothing wrong with random forest. It’s a perfectly good model. But when it is someone’s only tool, it implies they both don’t know much much about the toolkit, and also how that one particular tool works.
I rarely use anything but linear models, trees and forests fwiw.