They are only misleading if you allow yourself to be misled by them. It's an extremely informative measurement if you are aware of how it works and don't misinterpret the results.
None of these claims are mutually exclusive with one another.
"Great tool for misleading results." -> the results the tool provides are either mostly misleading (many are misleading), or are in large part misleading (a large part of each is misleading), potentially both
"Traceroute is easy to be misinterpreted" -> the results the tool provides are easy to misinterpret
"They are only misleading if you allow yourself to be misled by them" -> the results the tool provides require expertise to interpret, implying that otherwise they're (largely) misleading - the same thing the person said right above you
This is turning into a "well I like it and it has its place". Cool, it's just not what was being argued.
Yes, you can. It's basically a terminal case of something being unintuitive. Whether something is misleading is in the eye of the beholder.
Recently my mother felt misled by a car commercial. Her position was that saying things like "under this many years or that many miles" is misleading, because it suggests that it's a set of options she can pick from (which of course ended up not being the case).
Unfortunately for her, this is a natural language construct - whether she understands it correctly or not depends on how aligned her common sense regarding it is with people at large. She understood it differently and thus felt misled. But you may notice that ultimately it was her own mistaken understanding of the common parlance that misled her. So when she said this was misleading the only thing I could reasonably say was exactly this. That I did not find the phrasing misleading, and I'm sorry she'd been misled by it (irrespective of whether that was on her or on the world, as that doesn't really matter).
It's completely on people how they want to handle this. You can find people being misled by stuff like this to be unreasonable and just tell them so, or you can put out a disclaimer regardless. Depends completely per case. This goes all the way to having multiple mechanical interlocks at places with heavy duty xray sources, or preferring machine checked memory management.
