Every time I've encountered submodules in any work projects, I've personally replaced them with auto-incremented semver libraries (usually jars) and received copious thanks for it.
Submodules aren't ideal but I do prefer that you can pull down everything you need in a one liner instead of multi-stage pull, build, auth, download, build etc.
So I wouldn't say its better in every respect.
In my current job, which uses semver and conan and not submodules, submodules would have solved most of the problems. But unfortunately they are all git newbies (switching from svn just lately), so you cannot throw submodules at them yet.