DKMS is actually to speed things up, to cut out the middle man of waiting for devs to update their own stuff to work with the newest kernels, it speeds up release cycle quite a bit... theoretically.

In reality, whether it is a pain point or huge boon depends on your configuration and use case. On a gaming rig, you'd ideally have a bleeding edge system, where using all dkms would be a big boon for you, but would slow down updates. On an editing rig, you probably want something more stable, so you'd likely use a distro which holds back updates for longer like Debian. In this case, DKMS won't help because you're not updating your kernel often and it will end up just taking more space (but you might wanna use it anyway for convenience reasons down the line)

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dynamic_Kernel_Module_Support

I personally thing DKMS should be the default, with users who want the less compatible option able to do so by installing from source.