D&D's bard is my least favourite class and everything that tries to copy it is incredibly boring too.
like having a bard in the game dictates the tone more than anything but having a paladin does, because your game is now the kind of one where someone plays a musical instrument during a deadly fight
mechanically it's a very boring class too because it's most useful thing is standing near the fight and giving everyone a +1 to most rolls, a very generic but also very useful buff so you'll be doing basically all the time and no one else in the party has to do anything or think about it to benefit
compare and contrast with say, Pathfinder's dread vanguard which gets the same kind of buff but with a much shorter duration, but it also heals and gives a big bonus to breaking things, so you actually need to choose when to use it and if you need it for the heals or the buffs
also sets a tone but "evil but believes in teamwork" is a lot more flexible than "I'm going to play a lute in every single fight"
I was trying to think of bards I know but I've not played a ton of D&D and only ever watched The Help Action, so like, I have limited experience, and the current game I'm in has the PCs being part of a traveling circus in the fey wilds and the bard is a mime, so uh
Anyway, I think having the option is fine. A lot of folks play it like they're in a ren-faire fantasy (or medieval porno fantasy...), true, but that can be just fine for groups that play that way.
I think the really big failing here is 5e (maybe D&D in general) is actively ignoring other playstyles it already described in the players guide in the mechanics described later in the same section. And those are really basic alternatives! All the abilities you get are described "you're some guy with a flute! or maybe you sing!" except for maybe Battle Magic. Yeah it's really cool, but it's level 14! And only for one subclass!
Where's the fuckin' "beatin' a sword on your chest" they described earlier? Where's the dancing around, deftly dodging attacks and stabbing enemies to the kickass song in your head/you're humming shit? Where's the "make enemies experience dread-inducing OST out of nowhere" magic? Sonic attacks???? There's so much you could do with it and, ehhhhhh, you can probably stretch the mechanics to fit it, but it doesn't give you those sweet ass things to do. So yeah, you end up with fiddle guy.
But also I really like our fiddle guy.
I am so fucking sick of the fiddle guy he needs to get new material, across different editions, players and settings, he's the same guy and he sucks because he's never made as a serious character he's made for hijinks
sometimes i feel blessed that the tabletop ship has sailed without me because i've never had the displeasure of dealing with the Chaotic Horny Tiefling Bard outside of second-hand retellings