I used it a decade+ ago to learn to record and mix tracks, manage a huge mess of Jackd connections, run plugins, mix drums (DrumGizmo), release final audio files.
It worked great with external usb controllers and piano keyboards and gave me abilities and clarity I did not realize opensource tools could provide at the time.
Some other daws felt much better for electronic music, but didn't work that well on Linux.
Great software with some interesting history and relation to it's fully commercial flavour.
It had a bit of mixed reviews in the past, as binary releases were only provided from author for paid subscription (which I did, as you could do a really low monthly one). Thus what was included in most popular Linux distros was VERY old and much worse than the actual state of development.
According to Repology[0], most up-to-date distros package at least 8.6 (which is a bit old, but far from ancient). If you use an LTS distro, well, you get what you asked for.
So users got a very, very old app in some major distros. Even music-specific repositories were lagging.
I thing that impacted Ardour's "public image" for many people, while Ardour itself was really to blame.
I'm just happy it's still around and doing fine.