It's bad in this dimension for being a popular "eurogame". All it has to avoid it is a few hidden points from development cards. But most of the non-eurogames are far worse in this regard (e.g. in monopoly, this is far more common), and Catan would never have gotten away with it today. It's from 1995 after all.
True that non-eurogames are pretty bad here; Vinci suffered from this problem so badly that its successor (Smallworld) made every player's points private.
