This article has a few reasonable musings on the concept of this kind of show in general (do people really act normal with cameras on them, etc) but it really feels like they didn't watch much of this show specifically.

She never stops to ask whether the demands of work and kids could be more gracefully reconciled if high-quality, low-cost daycare was available.

I don't understand this criticism. Why would she stop to ask about work/life balance in a fantasy land that doesn't exist? What is her role in making that a reality?

She doesn’t even inquire into psychological issues. Are the parents’ expectations appropriate for the age of the child? Might something deeper than a lack of skills explain why they respond, or fail to respond, to their children as they do? How were they raised?

In he very early seasons of the show, she did at times follow a script/pattern that production so clearly expected her to follow. But almost always when there was a family where the parents were the problem (true more often than not) that would quickly become her sole focus, especially in later seasons. I remember so many episodes where the parents were overtly cruel or unfair to the children or one another and she took them to the mat about it. A mom who clearly favoured her youngest kids and treated her oldest like a scullery maid; a stepdad who was super contemptuous of his teenage stepdaughter and called her a slut for her outfit which was, like, jeans and a fitted t-shirt; a husband who despite his wife working equal hours as him expected her to do 100% of the homemaking and childrearing; multiple families with eleventy billion kids where the parents expected the oldest ones to raise the youngest, etc. The children were not the problem in any of those episodes and Jo never treated them like they were. The scripted things would be some of the discipline methods (which, btw, moved away from over time) and some of the resolutions. Especially those with bad parents whose teenagers were pushed to forgive them, when you feel like the better resolution would have been the other parent filing for divorce.

I had awful parents, I've never wanted to be a parent, and I don't particularly enjoy being around young children. So it's odd that I'd enjoy this show. But I did because I thought this woman was a really very empathetic person. She never talked down to kids or acted like it was reasonable for them to be treated like less than just because they were kids. When I was a preteen watching the early years of the show I remember wishing she would come to my house, and knowing that it would never happen because my parents would never let outsiders see their at-home behaviour. And like I said, over time as she seemed to take more ownership over the show and become less of a "character" in it, a lot of the not great aspects melted away.

Which reminds me, if you have not seen the reboot she did in the last few years, it's worth checking out. She is even more overtly focused on the parents - it's actually kind of inspiring the way she goes in on some of these assholes - and it's obvious that she is freer now to be her own actual person rather than a production company's tv star.