The title is not hyperbole. From spurious Gradle errors, extremely slow indexing, and expanding to fill all 64GB of my memory, Android Studio is beyond painful to use. One has to imagine if Google put in their contract with JetBrains "make it as unusable as possible, please".

I joke, but just barely. I have found it far more efficient to develop Android apps using Compose and calling ./gradlew to assemble the release from the command line. The only thing lacking in this regard is debugging support, but I think I can push a gdb server to the target and debug via ADB's TCP forwarding mechanism.