Their bad reputation is fully deserved, it's just also out of date. Reputations are almost always about first impressions, and the first impression with E-cores was bad. They've done a lot to fix the situation though, and they do indeed run pretty well nowadays if you have a more modern Intel CPU.

That said, manually disabling AVX-512 on P-cores just so I can have E-cores is still a *bad* tradeoff as far as I'm concerned, but I get that my use-cases aren't everyone's use-cases.