I agree with you. I use it a lot. Like you say the political stuff is usually biased like WaPo and the New York Times but it is fairly good on non political items.
We were directed to use it as a resource when I was in grad school. The profs weren’t phobic about it. Course you couldn’t cite something as being from Wikipedia in a paper, but they usually have great references, great way to dig up legitimate articles on your research topic.