The ribbon design is in your face, it takes up valuable real estate, and (to this day) I still find it hard to locate the options I'm looking for. I find it to be a HUGE step down from the functionality of menus.
MS Office had accumulated thousands of features, most of which were beloved by a tiny fraction of users, and completely useless to the rest. That tiny fraction wanted instant access without having to memorize keyboard shortcuts, but no two wanted the same one.
Ribbons are about the best way I can think of to accept that premise. Aggravating at first, but you and it gradually learn what you do most often, and reach a steady state.
But better is to reject those features, put up a simple interface that captures the things you do 99% of the time, eliminates the .9% of fancy flashy stuff that some people use occasionally but everybody else is grateful to have gone, and just tells you to suck up the remaining .1% of stuff that you might actually use sometimes but can't have.
There are still days when I have to boot up LibreOffice or MS Office for some document that just absolutely positively needs something extra. Today, it's edit marks on a document, and being able to switch back and forth between the original and edited form, restoring old edits. But that's a special use case and I'm just as glad to not have to be ignoring that feature most days.
When you are at the point of muscle memory, menu shortcuts are far better -- because they have keyboard shortcuts associated with them that for power users with muscle memory are 5x faster than mousing around.
It is not by accident that MS has kept those menu keyboard shortcuts even when killing their discoverability by killing the menu bar -- because their most valuable power users still press ALT-D-F-F first when encountering a new table rather than hunting around the ribbon bar.
With menus, you have to use sub and even sub-sub menus for organization, and the user has to mouse over or use the keyboard to see the sub-options. Every sub(-sub) menu looks the same, maybe with a tiny icon to help find it. With the ribbon, every top level category naturally has major sub-groupings (horizontally), within which more important / commonly-used items can use larger icons, split buttons can be used to show a default action with related actions in a drop-down, and option-groups can be presented as a dropdown or expanded to show them all at once (think "view layout" in a file explorer).
I have to admit I had a negative reaction to the ribbon initially, but especially with the thoughtful integration into Windows Explorer it's really grown on me since. I'm not sure it's appropriate to replace every use of a conventional menu bar but I think it's the best fit in a lot of places.
I think it was a good change. Anecdotally, I noticed a big drop in people not being able to find particular functions since it's introduction (if you exclude the spate of complaints about the shift to the ribbon itself, which fizzled out over time as people got used to it).
On the one hand it's a much more approachable and user-friendly design (especially the preview feature), on the other hand it blocks valuable screen real-estate; this is especially an issue ever since the 16:9 trend took over the mainstream laptop and monitor markets.
The issue most users had at the time (and some still do to this day) was that they felt it unnecessary and obtrusive. Personally, I welcomed the change since the old menus weren't as discoverable and obvious to me.
Since the shortcut keys stayed compatible (I think?) and the ribbons could (and still can) be hidden by default, I never really understood the bad reception of this feature by many (old-school & power-)users.
ToolTips also work very consistently. Hover, and a box appears, in most cases containing a full description and keyboard shortcut(s), and sometimes even helpful graphics.
I think you just don't like it because it's different to what you were used to.
On a 9:16 or 10:16 portrait display, it would be perfect, but an element like that should probably be on the side for a newer laptop. A very quick google image search suggests that isn't a configuration option.
I hate it when I'm in laptop mode, or on my desktop PC. My biggest problem is that their layout is unstable - it's context-dependent, size-dependent and seems to magically change with time from one use to another.
The second thing that annoys me is that the ribbon only shows a configurable subset of actions - which means I have no easy way to tell if the feature I'm looking for does not exist, or is just not assigned to ribbon.
For users like myself it was a step back as I skim read incredibly fast and have a hard time with remembering icons. I could vertically scan a drop down menu for what text I want 5X faster than finding the same option on a ribbon menu with half the items.
I was the same person who absolutely hated the vista and up start menu. I had about 4 columns on my xp start menu and could find anything I wanted very fast just skim reading it. Vista+ was horrible until I got an ssd as the search was always several seconds long.
Now I like the search on a ssd these days but until they worked the kinks out and I got an ssd it was way slower than a popout style menu.