The hamburger menu takes someone explaining it to you just one time to know what it is every time.
The hamburger menu looks like decoration, or a portion of the I Ching. Nothing about three horizontal lines says "I contain options for navigation."
Now, were six lines used, with every other line being indented, and then a \ or a / here and there, it would look like something folded up, and I would think, "Oh, unfold this thing." But three horizontal lines just ... no, I got nothin'.
I personally view the hamburger menu similar to my junk drawer at home. It's where the designer stuffs crap that isn't very important. So, it's the last place I look for when I need to get something done in an app.
I don't know the equivalent works for phone or tablet users with no such thing (AFAIK) as hover. To me, that's a problem with such interfaces beyond the hamburger icon.
And it’s hard to describe icons to someone else on the phone. I‘m not sure if Word is still the mess it used to be, but this kind of interface design can be really hard to understand and learn. Currently for me this is Blender. The software is complex, the interface mirrors this, but if you’re new to it, this is really hard to learn.
First of all, the whole problem domain has to be taught/discovered. And sure, people often learn by trial-and-error and it makes sense to try to maximalize this sort of discoverability in all software, but I would say that it doesn’t scale. Even with the “better” labeled menus, gimp is not intuitive to say the least.
So perhaps the (often annoying) teach you by showing is the better direction? My gripe with it is that it is often applied for trivial mobile apps for things like “search by using the search bar”.. but I think an all-menu/all-action text-based search functionality would be a must as well.