Hmm, sounds odd. I keep all my firearms cleaned/lubed with it and only it. From a cold war era G3 style rifle to a modern impingement AR15 style to my glocks. Where I will agree is that there are better cleaners and better lubes. With ballistol it's not a good fast solvent for a real dirty weapon. You can cut it with water, it emulsifies, to improve the cleaning but I don't usually even do that. I keep my guns cleaned routinely and it's a snap once you get down to the metal and just keep it lubed. Powder and crud pretty much wipe off. For a dirty dirty gun, sure you might want something more aggressive to work faster. I'd still just use ballistol, spray on and let it sit for 15 mins and then come back to wipe off. Repeat as needed. And I don't bore-snake or soak, just patches through the barrels.
While it's not really the best at anything it does, why I still swear by it is that it does all those things WHILE BEING NON-TOXIC. To me that's huge, maybe not to everyone. And I mean I use it everywhere, not just guns. All my leather, most of my plastic/rubber things, and of course most metals. Think door/window seals on your car. Holsters. Boots/belts. I even reconditioned an aging set of soft-bags on a used motorcycle I picked up. The liners, exteriors, and snap-clips were on the verge of cracking and just looking tired/worn/brittle. Sprayed ballistol all over and now they're nice and flexible, feel and look like new.
So sure, you can get another CLP for the guns, obenaufs for the boots, 303 protectant for car, etc etc. So many great products. But to me, having 1 product that does a dozen of these things quite well while being non-toxic and relatively cheap, it's a no-brainer. I buy it by the case online. My wife even came around to the smell! That did take a few months, but now she likes it. We use it on cat scratches for faster healing with less scarring too. Ballistol is what wd40 wants to be in terms of being multi-purpose, even despite one of them literally displacing water while the other emulsifies in it haha. Good luck out there!