Is NeetCode (or LeetCode) actually bad?

No, and the fact that our ratings can make it look like we think otherwise is not the intent. The problems themselves are fine. LeetCode is a good place to drill standard ideas, and doing a few more on a topic right after you learn it is exactly how it should be used, and some people genuinely find NeetCode a less overwhelming place to begin, which is completely valid. The same goes for A2Z, TLE, TUF, and the rest of them, because as a source of problems they are perfectly good. The issue was never the problems, it is two things that sit around them.

The first is what video walkthroughs do to you over time. Watching someone solve a problem trains you to reproduce their reasoning instead of building your own, and most of these videos skip the thinking entirely and narrate only the finished solution, so it feels productive while it quietly wires in the wrong default. Once your first instinct on a hard problem is to go see how somebody else approached it rather than to work it out from the constraints, that habit is genuinely hard to undo, and it is hardest to undo precisely when you are a beginner and it is the only habit you have ever built.

The second is the culture around them, which is its own problem. The streaks, the solved counts, the state of r/leetcode, the editorials written by people who do not really understand the material, the AI-generated code farming upvotes, and the steady amount of cheating in contests all add up to an environment that rewards the wrong things, and you tend to become the average of the room you spend your time in. There is more on that in Environment shapes skill. Plenty of strong engineers did come out of LeetCode and NeetCode, but that happened despite the environment rather than because of it, and it is far rarer than the people who grind for months and still cannot solve something genuinely new. Use the problems, skip the videos, and find a better room to learn in.