RF is not in any way only web automation tool. Sure, you can use Selenium with it to automate web ui testing. Or you can use playwright. Or you can just not do web ui testing and do mobile ui testing, or REST, or SAP, or pretty much any other automation you wish.
What RF provides is by far the best reporting, test tagging, test filtering, and test data injection compared to any other test automation framework. And you can automate pretty much anything using it.
I agree whole keyword driven thing is quite messy, but the reporting is the part I love about it. Actually being able to reason why things failed and where, if test case are semi-reasonably written.
Well, I bet that if they managed to be extremely unproductive with Robot Framework, they'd be equally unproductive with Python ;)
-- Robot Framework builds on top of Python and usually wraps python libraries -- such as Selenium or Playwright -- in a different API (which IMHO is usually easier to use) and provides some better reporting out of the box, so, I can't really see how the tool made people unproductive here...
I had a similar experience. After swapping out robot with pytest on a large project I was at least 4x as productive.
The one thing I did like was the separation of concerns between a "readable" specification written in a non turing complete markup language and test code. I find pytest tests difficult to parse.
The problem is that I found the markup language they built difficult not as expressive as I needed and the tooling around the framework made things difficult to debug.
In reaction to robot/gherkin I wrote my own equivalent framework based using strongly typed YAML with an emphasis on fail fast/crystal clear error messages:
Depending what RF is being used for, Selenium may be under the hood wrapped in multi-layers of keywords. In other cases, where testing is not web/REST based (protocol testing, HW testing), what is being used for executing logic is up to devs/testers.
Honestly if you know your Python you are better off with Selenium, which is probably what Robot uses under the hood anyway.