Cheap zoom lenses (and especially kit-zooms) are often the BEST lenses.
I wrote a whole thread on it here including examples and comparisons, but the summary is:
They're cheaper than almost any alternative
They're flexible and very fast to use, because zooming is always faster than changing primes
They improve your edits because you can get greater coverage and variety of shots in the same amount of time / setups
They are in the "sweet spot" between being too sharp and looking clinical and being too vintage, but their aberrations are often actually very aligned with the qualities of vintage lenses people want, just dialled down to a modest amount
They have smaller apertures so are easier to focus / less prone to focus errors and don't need as much ND in brighter situations
They often have native AF and are kept updated with firmware updates
They often have OIS
Those with variable apertures are much closer to being constant DOF, where the more you zoom in the smaller the aperture gets, counteracting the effects of the longer focal-length, which makes your footage more consistent
They don't get a lot of love online, but that's because most of the discussion online is about the things that are THE MOST of something (the sharpest, the newest, the biggest, the most expensive, etc) and being cheap and good is only really attractive to people who actually shoot in the real world and where a happy middle ground is desirable.
My most used lens is a variable aperture zoom lens, despite me owning many much "better" lenses.