Software quality and component library quality are a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, Kicad's editors are popular enough and good enough that major vendors (like Digikey [1] and SnapEDA [2]) are offering Kicad footprints for products.
Does anyone use these in production? I thought most companies of scale had dedicated teams or individuals to act as component librarians because the publicly available footprints are so bad.
They're not technically faulty, just incomplete. Everyone has different, ephemeral needs for purchasing and stocking; as long as your footprint matches what's on the invoice you're fine.
It's been a decade since I've had a problem with a buggy footprint from a default library (contrasted with quite a few buggy footprints I made myself). But just two weeks ago I had a board problem because my selected LED had a slightly different leadframe and pad geometry than the library version. (A '3030' package, comparable to offerings from Cree and Lite-on and Lumileds and - I thought - my LCSC-sourced Everbright.) The stock library footprint was produced in 2016 for a nominally equivalent package from a different manufacturer. When I used one part number in Kicad and bought a different part number, it's obviously my fault. If I worked at a company of scale instead of a company of 20 I'd not be selecting random LCSC part numbers, but that's more so that they'd be confident in their ability to actually buy the thing than because they distrust the stock libraries.
Not to mention supported by PCBA vendors like MacroFab and CircuitHub! It's awesome to be able to upload 2-3 files and have it all auto-generate the PCB's and find the parts.
2) Both Altium and Eagle have nice component libraries, which KiCad has a lot of work to improve.