It's hard to tell if Salesforce has been a positive for Heroku for keeping it alive, or a negative for mismanaging the company, since we don't know what they would have done if they stayed independent and had to actually compete. But I'm pretty sure if they were still independent and had to compete in the market with only the features they have right now, they would likely be out of business. There's very little reason to choose Heroku these days, and I say that as someone who has code running in production on Heroku's platform.
The product is stable, there's a ton of new features (like pipelines), and can't imagine starting a serious project and not using Heroku.
Heroku still doesn't have any data hosting options. You have to go to a third party for this.
Heroku doesn't have any static site hosting options. You have to go to a third party.
But the biggest problem I have with Heroku's model is how much I need to pay. I've been a Heroku customer for years and I'm still not exactly sure what a dyno is. And if I get it wrong, I can have auto-scaling... but only if I'm paying a minimum of $250 per month. Now that's not a lot to big companies, but for bootstrappers that's insane. And I only get 2.5GB of RAM for that $250/mo? And if I'm using microservices, every service costs me a minimum of $25/mo, $250/mo if I want auto-scaling on those services.
Like I said, Heroku is great and I use it in production and pay them money every month, but man if it's not stuck in 2015. Luckily so is my application so I don't have too many issues except for the ridiculous cost even as EC2 is dramatically cheaper now than it used to be (does Heroku support Graviton? I don't think it does), but PaaS in general is "the old way of doing cloud" and Heroku is becoming less relevant every day.