I'm using it, in fact I was a contributor a few years ago.

But considering that the default installer offers a ton of adware too (although you can opt-out of all of that) might not make it the best counter-example for the purpose of this discussion.

The core is open source though (GPL even), so a savy user could just download the .jar (+ libs + optionally a .exe launcher) and launch it like any other java process without all the installer crap. But that's not something most people are aware of.

Admittedly it has been 5+ years since I touched Azureus, but at least at that time it was a complete memory pig which basically made it unusable.

It works fine. Still a bit of a memory hog but we have more ram now. They're going down the path of adware/spyware too, however, you have to opt out in a convoluted way and you're still shown ads. But at least it doesn't carry a coin miner. Yet. Fingers crossed.