Firstly I am not Microsoft (just a long-time user from Australia), so my comments are only from my 8 year experience with Power Apps. I also don't like making assumptions, but you sound like a professional developer (that is meant as a compliment) and if so I can understand your perspective on some of what you have posted. I will append your 4 mains point below with some brief observations.
Expensive — Even simple apps require Premium licenses and Dataverse dependency, making basic solutions disproportionately costly.
I have been using SharePoint as a datasource almost exclusively for the 8 years (so no extra cost here). Apps have been developed across many customers and some quite complex requiements and have yet to find anything I could not produce to the customers's satisfaction. I will add the caveat that the biggest single dataset used was about 150k records (so if you have 1m records, then yes, Dataverse would be the direction to take).
Complex — Real scalability demands deep architecture, governance, and advanced formula mastery — far from “low code.”
Yes, it can be as complex as you want/need to make it. However one of the main aims of Power Apps is to empower the "citizen developer". The large majority of my apps have been quite simple replacements for Excel-based data sets with some functionality (view/add/edit, reports, emails etc) added. Power Apps is perfect for this and they can be done relatively low code.
Restrictive — Delegation limits, throttling, control ceilings, and data source constraints frequently slow down real‑world projects.
Yes - broadly speaking, there are some restrictions, particularly on larger data sets. I have found almost all perfectly manageable with a bit of planning on data structure (in line with my comments on the first point). Of course all of this is proportionate to the complexity and data size that is required,
Performance‑challenged — Load delays, connector bottlenecks, and inconsistent responsiveness make the user experience unpredictable.
I have found quite the opposite (within the context of my requirements as above). My users are both office and field based (iPads) and write hundreds of records daily including photos/file uploads. I have very little in the way of problems (except low-signal strength issues) with any data not being read and written properly and efficiently, in fact most comments are on how quick it responds, however you may have had a different experience with more complex code.
So I guess the issue is really around what functionality you expect Power Apps to replace. I suspect that (for the reasons you noted) Power Apps may not be the optimal solution for some "bigger end" system requirements, but it certainly has a role in a broad range of other diverse applications.
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