Haha. Funny, but doesn’t match widespread opinion. Personally it is the best money I have ever spent in my kitchen. Fantastic results. Food often even better than fried, oven baked, pan fried or grilled. I explicitly choose my air fryer for certain cooking even though all those other options available to me. So the opposite of substandard to be honest… there must be a word for that?

Strongly disagree. Maybe it's not "frying" in the sense of a big bucket of boiling oil, but there is a huge array of cooking that is vastly faster with my air fryer.

Roasting veggies, roasted potatoes, frozen foods like fries, things like that. I can be done with a batch of fries before my oven has even gotten to temperature. Massive time savings.

If it works and is capable of cooking your food better and faster than a standard oven, who cares what’s inside?

You can use oil - that works too!