Homebrew stinks of over-optimization and deletionism.
In contrast to how it used to be, Homebrew now seems designed for people that only want popular bleeding edge packages, and nobody else. If I just wanted to install google-chrome, sublime, and skype, I would use the app store. I used to use Homebrew to install more obscure packages that were useful to me, like Arduino, Processing, and some specialized bluetooth tools.
It is especially frustrating because there are good reasons to not want bleeding edge. OSX ages pretty well, and new versions of macOS often remove important features. As long as you have security updates, I think it is reasonable if you run an older version of macOS. For some of us, Catalina and Big Sur were pretty painful, especially if they are a liability for how you make money. Losing total-terminal and total-spaces were a big blow to my workflow, and not at all simple to work around, as well as certain accessibility software.
Homebrew being so aggressive about updating itself compounds many other issues it has. For one thing, major changes are made frequently, and it is very aggressive about pruning packages and only supporting recent version of macOS.
So, I have lost count of the number of times Homebrew has broken itself.
Homebrew will go out of its way to search through its history and tell you a package has been removed, but gives you no easy way to install them. Homebrew could make it fairly easy to revert updates, since so much of it is in a git repo, but it doesn't.
I wanted to install an SNES emulator, and I was using an install of macOS from maybe two years earlier, and Homebrew installed a version that was incompatible with my OS. Since it was a cask, I don't think anything depended on it. I had to actually search through the Homebrew repo history and check out that specific formula, since nobody had a tap for it.
Unless you are near the center of the bell curve, you don't matter. And it is a shame, because I really think that it wouldn't impose a significant cost to support more of us, and substantially improve its UX.
Homebrew used to be a powerful repository of most macOS software. Some of its less used packages could be unreliable, sure, but that was the case regardless of where I got them. Now it is morphing into an App Store. This is part of why I gave up on macOS two years ago and went to Linux full time. I can't rely on Homebrew.