Sounds like it's only an "absolute train wreck" if your workflow depends on editing PDFs with annotation layers in software that uses PDFKit.

My interaction with PDFs starts with viewing a linked one in Safari and ends with "save as PDF to web receipts folder" and for that kind of usage there are absolutely no problems. I always thought that for anything half-advanced with PDFs (like filling out forms) you'd want to install Acrobat Reader anyway...

Filling out PDF forms is a pretty normal consumer task these days, I wouldn't call it even half-advanced.