I fear the whole "monk's suck" argument is grossly dismissing some of the best features of monks while also showcasing just how biased some campaigns can be. I'll take a list of natoable arguments and share my take on each.
1. Monks have low DPS
This is pretty untrue in alot of scenarios. When I see people comparing the DPS of a fighter/barbarian to a monk, they forget one key offensive trait the monk has over them: Magical Attacks.
Not alot of creatures have immunity to nonmagical BPS, but there's a plethora of monsters, especially at high levels, that are at least resistant. This means that it's possible in any given encounter that a fighter's/barbarian's damage is being halved. The monk has no such burden.
There's also the fact that stunning strike also carries it's own DPR. Any additional DPR added by your teammates that are influenced by the Stunning Strike is Stunning Strike's damage. If a fighter would normally do 62.2 DPR and he now does 89.61 DPR, that 27.41 damage is directly attributed to Stunning Strike.
2. Stunning Strike isn't a good feature.
I agree, monks are over-reliant on Stunning Strike and it tends to hurt them more than help them. It's probably better to spend your Ki points to constantly dodge so you tank very well or dash to be a good mobile character. That said, it is useful to attack multi-target enemies, against the intuition of most people.
You get 4 attacks and you can distribute them to 4 separate enemies. If your enemies are equally difficult such that one is no more important to target than the other and you're in a typical fight, they're around CR 7-10 which doesn't have the amazing con saves that the single boss encounter would. You're also able to reduce the enemy capabilities to some degree even if you don't get all of them. 3 targets normal and 1 stunned is better than the single boss encounter normal still.
3. Ki is rare.
This is the most foreign point I can feel. Maybe I'm the weird one for maximizing my potential.
If you prescribe to the 2 short rests per adventure, you have Ki equal to 3 x monk level. That's plenty for most adventures.
But I see people literally gimping their own group by not taking advantage of short rests. It's essentially at-will, you just need a place to barricade, which is common in any type of adventure, and recover. If you don't use up all of your spellslots, all of your hitdice, all of your resources, you've gimped your party from an optimal game. And if you're not playing optimally, you shouldn't complain that you feel underpowered. That one's on you for not simply saying "I want to take a short rest." It's beneficial to everyone unless a character gimped themselves by not using their short rest feature.
Time pressure is rarely ever so tight as to not have around 2-3 hours to rest within an adventuring day. I feel that time pressure is training wheels for a DM. They don't know how to pace their games and how to actually challenge the adventurers so they remove opportunities for the adventurers to properly use their natural abilities. Short rests should really just happen after every 1-2 combat encounter by sheer principle of being efficient.
In my games, it's not rare for 4-5 short rests a day. Their hit dice should be extremely low or I've never actually decided to challenge my players by pure virtue of challenge.
