Examples being out of date is definitely an issue since a lot of things are still changing quickly in the ecosystem as a whole. I think it’s getting better as more packages go 1.0 and internals stabilize a bit, but nonetheless.

As far as your comment about “awkwardness”, the key point for me was when I actually started to understand/embrace multiple dispatch as a programming paradigm. If you try to write Julia like in a an imperative or oo or etc. style, it may work, but will be clunky and quite possibly full of type instabilities. But if you write Julia in a “dispatch-oriented” paradigm then it really is just as performant and elegant as advertised, IMO.