What is the current state of Playables API?

My understanding on how Playables as marketed when it released/was in beta was as some hot-ney-thingy that will replace the cumbersome-Mecanim-state-machines-where-you-have-to-code-anything-more-complex-than-walking-with-more-hand-written-exceptions-than-rules, is this accurate?
There is one example from 2015 where you could use mecanim state machines for walking and whatnot, but the playables would be used to add-in animations on demand, like the sword telling the character how to animate (https://forum.unity.com/threads/a-nice-playable-example.343324/)
This example does not work anymore, it is using methods or classes that does not exist anymore, even if you use Unity.Animations rather than Experimental namespaces (might have gotten those namespace names wrong), does the "Blending an AnimationClip and AnimatorController" (see below) example replaces it?
However, it seems nobody is using (my metric is google search for Playable API only finding Unity Docs), there are no up to date examples on how to do the complex stuff (we do have examples https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/Playables-Examples.html, but one can't even get a character walking and his feet not sliding on the ground using those)

What exactly is it meant to be used for?
Can we expect to get up to date examples on how to do the complex stuff?
Is it even meant to be used to do complex stuff? Or is it meant to be used as a hook-in to extend mecanim state machines?

 

Three years later, and this got no response, I'm exploring the same thing. I wonder if they abandoned it for Bolt Integration?

 

I basically answered those questions over in this thread.