Tours aren't always bad, but they're often just poorly implemented, with too many steps that don't mean anything to the user. Onboarding that's contextual, like embedded tips, or relevant, like targeted onboarding by persona, or action-oriented onboarding, like checklists tend to be better.
After leading onboarding and in-app education teams at Dropbox, I started Dopt [0], which is a react component library and SDKs to make it easier to build tours, but also more contextual and less distracting onboarding experiences like embedded tips and checklists. My hope with Dopt is that you can still build tours when necessary (like 2 step tours to introduce a new feature), but have a bigger and better toolkit for all types of onboarding and education.