The Facebook newsfeed also got a lot of opposition in the beginning. Whether or not a very innovative product is good or bad can not be decided on whether people like to oppose or make fun of it in the beginning.
BlenderBot 3 is likely running on substantially fewer resources than GPT-2/3 and thus should not be expected to have the same performance.
It seems you are right. I thought previously that BlenderBot was supposed to be useable outside of the research enviroment.
I read through the description and a key difference seems to be that Blenderbot actually has long-term memory about the user with whom it interacts.