This comment page is full of examples of very real issue with Time Machine which will bite you at some point if you use it. It’s not quite good. It’s bug riddled and Apple refuses to actually do the work to fix it because they would rather you buy iCloud.
But good or bad only make sense as evaluations relative to something. In my case, that's Linux (I never felt comfortable with any backup solution I looked at there while I was using it, especially not the Ubuntu built-in ones; maybe things have changed with btrfs now) and Windows, which doesn't even try (and all the third party ones I've looked at seem extremely shady in one way or another).
The fact that macOS has a pretty solid one out of the box is more than I'm expecting from an OS at this point. I've restored from it a couple of times, both the entire system and individual files, and it did exactly what I expected of it.
iCloud Drive is also a bit iffy, it does a lot of weird shit with file meta data that can screw up file processing.