It should not be based on what YOU (the developer or designer) feels, it should be based on user research. User research shows hamburger menus are bad.
To be honest, I didn't even think about it until now, but since you mentioned it, I'll ask my design team to do a small-ish research and in the future try to build navigation better accessible for people with impaired vision. I'll hardly be a top-notch experience, but at least we'll try to pick the lowest hanging fruit.
Not saying that hamburger menus can or cannot be accessible; just saying that, as an engineer, you really have an obligation to make something that is accessible. This is a basic, non-negotiable requirement for all software.
Info for the underinformed: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/behavioral-...
https://www.whoisaccessible.com/guidelines/largest-web-acces...
What research shows that hamburger menus are bad? Why the conclusion is this one? What makes them bad?
If you are to advocate for data oriented decisions, you'd better present the data!
No. Not at all. Users are the suckers who shall know from the birth what a hamburger menu presents to them. They shall have special religious skills to ask the deity what a GUI element represents: a label, a menu, a link. They shall be punished with 1 px borders on 4k screens. The windows are not meant to be resized.
Users suck /s
https://github.com/bigjohnson/Real-Programmers-Don-t-Eat-Qui...
(citation needed)
Real user research should be in the context of your application flow but there is research that shows hamburger menus aren't great for users.
People look at research like this and treat it like a maxim to never use hamburger menus. Sometimes it's a lazy way to avoid having to design good navigation. Sometimes it's the best of a bunch of bad choices. Overall, it's a 'use the right tool for the job' thing.
The top speed of a Model T was about 42 MPH, comparable to the fastest horses. So Ford wasn't delivering on this user request regardless. https://techhistorian.com/ford-model-t-top-speed/ https://horseyhooves.com/how-fast-can-a-horse-run/
While horses couldn't maintain this speed for long, horses also broke down much less frequently than the earliest cars.
Given what was state of the art at the time, I would believe that people would have asked for smaller trains that don't need a track, and not for "faster horses", if they'd been given the question. And this smaller, trackless train, is effectively what automotive manufacturers delivered.
I’ll also add that NNg spent years trying to get people to adopt the “pie menu” despite clear evidence that they confuse the heck out of users. So, I’m not always inclined to take their word for things without doing my own testing.
Beyond that, when you're doing research that few other organizions are, you're bound to get things wrong sometimes. That's fine. Modern medicine only recently discovered that peptic ulcers, which affect 1 in 10 people in their lifetime, are often caused by a treatable bacterial infection rather than poor lifestyle choices. Nobody gets it perfect. Self-correction is a sign of trustworthiness.