You have to take what the large numbers of people are saying with a grain of salt. For every thousand people that start a YouTube channel, only a few are going to actually make real money at it. There's just so much competition.
So, there are going to be a lot of people looking for reasons they didn't succeed. Most people don't like blaming themselves, or admitting that luck and random chance play a large role, so they will blame Google, Adsense, YouTube, etc. The result is that it will seem like a lot of people are mad at Adsense. The people who are happy with Adsense aren't going to spend much of their time defending it--they're too busy making new videos so they can make more money.
The truth is that Adsense doesn't have to do anything illegal or shady to make money--they have more content providers than they'll ever need, and more sets of eyes on their ads than ever before.
Instead of looking for alternatives to Adsense, try to look at what you can control and see if there's ways to improve your odds of success. Otherwise, YouTube might just not be for you--there are other ways to be successful outside of YouTube, but if online video is what you want to do, you really need to include YouTube as a major part of your audience.