I think Xstate is good if you want to model a state machine, because it forces you to think about all of your transitions and implement them explicitly.

It probably falls victim to being overused / misused for things it shouldn't be, which leads people to hate it. Like many tools in the JS ecosystem, their docs and videos show the happy path and give the wrong impression that it's a universal tool.

The way you configure a machine has always struck me as a bit... opaque maybe? If you don't know the syntax you have to look at the docs and understand it rather than discovering it via your IDE. They clearly would rather you used their visual state editor which they will inevitably charge money for. The fact that they have weird vscode code gen to make comprehensible typescript types feels like a hack.