They do their job by preventing you from having to timesink with doing all the encryption/decryption work.

My negativity towards PGP is towards how email encryption is not mandatory and we really need a better system than PGP if email encryption needs to be mandatory. That and there is better alternatives for PGP in other situations, like age for file encryption. I've found myself only using PGP for 3 people in my life.

These are two articles that discusses some PGP shortcomings:

https://www.latacora.com/blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem/

https://www.latacora.com/blog/2020/02/19/stop-using-encrypted/