Max and Max for Live are both great, though I do wish for something more like a normal programming API. I own Max and have loved to use it but dealing with the fact that it's a visual language can be very painful. I know a lot of people who just moved away from Max to JUCE, which is a C++ framework for writing VSTs, AUs, etc. The problem is that in that case you lose a lot of the power of Max for Live, since Ableton Live only exposes its deep internal API through Max for Live. It's a huge shame there isn't a C or C++ API for Ableton Live.

I don't really use Max that much anymore, since ultimately the benefit is that it's supposed to be easier to use than C++, but I find that really hard to believe in my experience. Another supposed benefit was supposed to be that Max came with a bunch of UI and DSP stuff built in, but they seem to have now neglected that aspect of the software and instead creating new projects like gen~ and RNBO (I'm not sure what the point of RNBO is). The thing is, JUCE gives us all the stuff that it was cool that Max came with 2 decades ago, plus more, while being less buggy and able to create production quality plugins.

I think the ultimate staying power of Max is simply due to it having aesthetic weight in the artistic community. It's still the "cool option" for the interactive art exhibition crowd. Other than that, the only thing really keeping it alive is Ableton...

Max is still a great piece of software, but these days, just learn to code.