I haven't stubbed my toe on the former yet, but I agree it's not great. I'm mainly storing media, photos, etc. (relatively not compressible) so the latter doesn't matter much to me. I think that's probably a common use case for a drive you can read anywhere, so I still like ExFAT for that, generally speaking.
Is the performance decent for the ‘cost’ of lacking features?
I would say yes, but I'm not pushing it exceptionally hard. I would say it makes a good default unless/until you run into a problem with it.