As with all things, it's a tradeoff. Hamburger menus are always less than ideal, but I can see that the tradeoff of them is worthwhile on small screens. But if you aren't on a mobile device, there's no reason to use them. Use actual menus, or use icons that give some hint of the functionality behind them.
Yep, hamburger menus are the junk drawers of software, with all sorts of things getting shoved into them without much thought. You might get some loose grouping but that's the extent of it.
And to make it worse, if the number of items in a hamburger menu grows too long the menu becomes increasingly unusable, so many things just get left out and aren't accessible from the top level at all, remaining buried in some modal behind a button in some obscure, unsearchable part of the app.
On the desktop it's one of the reasons I'm partial to macOS. Apps there have no reason to not use the global menubar, and so even most cross platform apps populate it with sensibly organized menus, making those apps more usable than they are on other platforms where only a hamburger menu is presented.
Love this metaphor. Hiding the main nav behind a generic button always gives me the impression that the designers don’t really see it as an important part of the website. Imagine you’d have to open up an unlabeled closet to find the navigation signs in a public building that actually show you what is where. Or if the table of contents in a book was hidden inside the folded cover.
I can see the problem with space and touch target size on mobile and don’t really have a better solution for that (maybe call the button “menu” instead and limit the number of top-level items like you would in a “proper” nav), but I hate to see hamburger icons on desktop screens.
Or the engineers are in a situation which requires having non-engineers making engineering decisions.