Agree on pure IC ones. Hybrid ones, like the one on the Prius, while still technically a CVT, are nothing like the jatco crap Nissan and others had been putting on IC cars. They are quite reliable.

I think it was Honda who tried out a 2 motor planetary gear setup to eliminate the transmission and I don't know why it was abandoned because it was brilliant.

The idea was that you need a certain velocity and torque to hold the drive train at a given speed, and instead of using reconfigurable gearsets for that, you use a differential, and one of the output shafts is sometimes an input shaft. One of the output shafts is attached to the wheels, the other to a motor. At some speeds output shaft B is stationary. To accelerate, you feed power into the motor and now it's speeding up shaft A. At lower speeds, you bleed power off of shaft B by running the motor as a dynamo, using it to charge the batteries and run auxiliary equipment.

In the hybrid version there was an ICE on the input shaft (or an ICE and a ganged electric motor) but on a full electric you could run two motors with different torque curves and balance the inputs for each speed.

The 10R80 in the F-150 has known problems, while the ZF8 is one of the best transmissions currently made. It's also used in BMWs, the Toyota Supra, and the new Ineos Grenadier. Having driven it, my only issue was that it was slow to switch from deceleration/engine braking mode to acceleration mode. That programming allows it to feel more like a manual when you let off the gas, but it takes a good fraction of a second to switch between them.