It does a pretty good job at emulating CAM16 with a fraction of the parameters, computational complexity, and processing; it’s no wonder it was adopted by CSS.

I don’t know what you mean by “not being linked to any perceptual color space” - it is derived from CAM16 & CIEDE2000, pretty similar in ethos to other spaces like ITP and the more recently published sUCS.

There’s also tons of discussion on w3c GitHub about OKLab, and it’s evolved in many ways since the original blog post such as improved matrices, new lightness estimate and OKHSV/OKHSL, and very useful cusp & gamut approximations.

I have a hard time seeing how it’s a nightmare in practice!