She's topical right now, and the book contains some good ideas and arguments against totalitarianism and collectivism.
But a writer she is not! She reminds me in a vague way of Marion Zimmer Bradley, a dreadful sci-fi/fantasy writer who insisted on stopping the action for 10-15 pages in every chapter while she used her cardboard cutout characters as a soapbox. Same as with Rand, I read Bradley on a friend's recommendation. Friend is an electrical engineer/IT person which is probably why she didn't notice the awful style.
I happen to disagree with Bradley's ideas (she was a radical and probably lesbian feminist) and agree with (most of) Rand's, but that makes absolutely no difference on the separate fact that neither of them could write their way out of a paper bag.
From what I have gathered from reading Rand and reading about her, her main problem was an ego as big as all outdoors. That prevented a good, decent editing job of her books. But that does not dismiss the ideas that she so laboriously expounded. The book is a book of philosophy. Instead of being written as a dry textbook that probably would have gone nowhere, the tool she used was fiction, creating an audience with the non-academic public. The public is getting the message. The academics dismiss her, because they scorn the “little people”.