Leave it to America to turn that game into a massive commercial succuss, while somehow using it to teach people the exact opposite message.
Talk about tricking everyone into participating in a direct, visceral lesson, and somehow failing to actually teach anyone anything.
Played by the rules (or using the official "short game" rules), it is not that bad. There has been a lot of progress made in board game design in the last few decades and there are way better options today, but if you are stuck with Monopoly, just read the damn rulebook, it will improve your experience a lot.
A game should take less than an hour, involve a lot of negotiation, and be pretty aggressive (gameplay-wise!).
Monopoly without rule modifications is nearly unplayable.
Specifically, the monopoly dynamic.
By terrible house rules I mean things like collecting money on "free parking", limiting trade or not auctioning unbought property.
I have yet to see commonly practiced house rules that improve the game. I am sure there are, but most people who know enough about game design to actually improve on the game typically don't play Monopoly.
Games have a fine tuned balance between resource sinks and sources, if you break the balance, for example by removing a sink, as it is the case here, you break the game. Here it tends to result in much longer and boring games.
Plus, it is a poor comeback mechanism. If you don't have property, cash alone is not enough to get you back into the game. Monopoly already has a limited but better designed comeback mechanism with "repair" cards.
Locally: everyone I remember talking to played a variant of the game as a kid, and didn't like it. Matches my experience too. Hell, the most fun I had with this game as a kid was grabbing the box and spending half a day alone role-playing with the little plastic houses.
Globally: the game has meme status for what I described. Things that get to the point of being memes tend to be broadly representative.