This really contradicts my own experience, with both Sony and Nikon RAWs, as I see no difference in highlights/darks recovery with my photos. Thing is, Darktable is super technical unlike Lightroom or most commercial software, and hides very little from the user, so it's fairly demanding to user's knowledge. Just like processing in Photoshop that Lightroom doesn't replace for all cases because LR is more oriented towards magic.

What I like about Darktable is vastly superior color uniformity and handling, and its tone equalizer module that allows for visual zoning control; it replaces most 3rd party plugins for Photoshop. PS really feels more and more outdated at this point for the de facto most popular software for photo manipulation, since it doesn't include modern tools and you have to construct massive workarounds or buy additional plugins.

What I dislike about Darktable is lack of persistent masking; currently all masks are generated by previous modules in the pixelpipe, so going back in editing can alter the mask.

AI magic I guess. I'm just a hobbyist but it's given some good results for me with whatever i've thrown at it. Maybe I don't know what I'm missing out on with Lightroom but Darktable is more than good enough for my use case!