-- Robot Framework builds on top of Python and usually wraps python libraries -- such as Selenium or Playwright -- in a different API (which IMHO is usually easier to use) and provides some better reporting out of the box, so, I can't really see how the tool made people unproductive here...
The one thing I did like was the separation of concerns between a "readable" specification written in a non turing complete markup language and test code. I find pytest tests difficult to parse.
The problem is that I found the markup language they built difficult not as expressive as I needed and the tooling around the framework made things difficult to debug.
In reaction to robot/gherkin I wrote my own equivalent framework based using strongly typed YAML with an emphasis on fail fast/crystal clear error messages:
https://hitchdev.com/hitchstory/
(in the process of creating it I discovered that YAML really needs type safety and built a library called strictyaml to underpin it).