There is GCN and cycling magazines and influencers, and then there is this Bulgarian Youtuber who rode tens of thousands of km on road, gravel, tracks, including 400km road days, on a 3x 2012 Stevens Sonora, loved it so much he bought 6 of them.

No idea what he’s saying since YouTube doesn’t auto translate, possibly because his channel is too small or doesn’t understand Bulgarian.

3x gearing is kind of underappreciated in a lot of ways. Gives really good gear range without compromising on spacing or chain line. It can be a little difficult to dial in, but with modern shifters it isn’t too bad assuming you don’t put it in incompatible gears like small-small or big-big. It also works well with friction shifting, but a lot of people don’t like that, but using friction for the front and indexed in the rear is a pretty good compromise that gets rid of a pot of the problems and makes it really easy to trim the front derailleur so it doesn’t rub.

To summarize, with 3x, or even some 2x systems, you can get more gear range than even with a 10-52 cassette, and you don’t even need anything fancy. Just a long cage rear derailleur and you can even use an 8 speed bike since the spacing will be pretty close anyway compared to 1x systems.