ROS beginner here. I've been experimenting with ROS in my spare time for about a week, with the ultimate goal of building a trainable robot. So far, I've built a custom robot arm in gazebo, converted it to URDF, and hooked up gazebo to ROS. The next step is to start controlling joints.
A few years ago I tried to run a project based on ROS and gave up in the end due to compatibility problems (I was installing ros packages on top of an existing Ubuntu and it caused all kinds of problems). Now that I'm using their pre-built docker image and took the time to read the tutorials, I'm finding it more reliable and much nicer.
The tutorials are very clear and all the steps have "just worked" for me, although the individual packages don't always seem very well documented.
catkin doesn't seem like a heavyweight build system - more like an opinionated layout combined with some cmake macros and some scripts, built on top of cmake. I can see how this would be useful for myself as well as real roboticists to develop multiple packages in parallel without having to poke through complex and disparate build systems. A robotics student would want to dive into C++ or Python as fast as possible as opposed to figuring out the build system, and I think catkin serves this purpose.
Also, it's common for inexperienced linux/mac users to get confused between multiple installations - when they have to compile things from source, i.e. opencv. I wonder if the ros command line tools are partly designed to help students overcome that obstacle, i.e. the pattern roscommand packagename rosoptions.
I'd also argue against the added complexity of avoiding single points of failure during early stage robot development. Having to think about distributed systems and SRE would be a huge distraction from the already complex task of designing a robot and its software. I also very much hope that ROS isn't currently being used in self-driving cars without a lot of safety systems including hardware ones.