Unrelated but having played with it recently what I really like about Godot is its 35MB or something to download and start playing with. Meanwhile every other engine is 7 zillion petabytes or whatever.
For getting kids into programming, its a beautiful thing.
It also compiles from scratch pretty fast, and the code isn't hard to read. I was able to find and fix a minor bug I'd been experiencing within a couple hours.
It's a beautiful middle ground between simple game frameworks and big clunky engines. It's precisely what I'd been looking for.
There's a reason for the large size of other engines though (they're still only ~10GB if you don't plan to release on every platform). You have to implement pretty much everything yourself in Godot, so if you're going to do anything non-trivial, there's going to be a lot of work to implement things that are already included in the other engines. There was a post on the Godot subreddit recently by a team making a 3D ARPG, and they said that if they had to do things over again, they'd use Unreal Engine due to the amount of work and engine customisation they've had to do just to get standard features that are included in Unreal.
Godot is definitely a good introduction to game dev, it's the first engine I used and it's very beginner friendly, but you quickly end up hitting roadblocks once you move past anything more complicated than a 2D platformer.
It's absolutely wild to compare Godot with UE4, they're just serving totally different purposes. If somebody chose the wrong option for their project, yeah that's a huge mistake.
2D games are hardly some sad niche for beginners though, it's an enormous fraction of non-AAA development, and there really aren't a ton of good 2D engines out there.
