"Hamburger menus" are and will forever be, in my mind, a lazy design for "catch all" stuff. (On Apple's platforms, it's three dots, but it's the same thing.)
Joel Spolsky has an old post somewhere where he says the reason the Palm Pilot failed but the iPhone succeeded at making mobile devices "a thing" is that desktop and mobile are two different things; the Palm tried to do a desktop interface on mobile.
I'm ok with three-dot menus on mobile, especially for features like "settings" that I don't use all the time - Whatsapp's dots menu works for me.
Using a dots/hamburger menu on desktop is lazy, I'd agree with you there; using it on desktop for things that people do use a lot like the editing menu in a painting program is atrocious.
I'm generally not a hamburger menu fan, but I've come to accept it in Firefox/Chrome/Edge/etc because I rarely ever need to bring up the menu anyway so it conserves precious vertical space on a widescreen display.
When I DO need to bring up the menu, I'm usually one to two clicks from where I need to go.
When a hamburger menu encompasses the whole UI (metaphorically speaking) I'd definitely agree it's problematic-- and the same goes for random placement of menu items into a hamburger menu. That's just lazy design.
The typical desktop hamburger menu is still horribly unstructured compared to File/Edit/... that it replaced.
IIRC at some point in Opera, you could move the top-level menu into the hamburger, but it was still the same top-level menu as before. That would be better.
I think hamburgers work in browsers because they are just chrome for an actual application running inside the browser tab. Having a browser menu just above an application menu inside the browser tab is something I can actually see being problematic.
