vterm is great - I had it in my config for a while and it's hands down the best way to put a terminal in Emacs. But for me it's the whole "encapsulate a terminal in Emacs" concept that I find unuseful. That's a personal preference though - I've been used to having dozens of xterms scattered around my desktops for longer than I've been using Emacs, so that's just more comfortable for me.
I'll use regular ol' shell occasionally when I just need to throw around some commands but for anything that needs a real terminal emulator I just open another xterm.
I'll use regular ol' shell occasionally when I just need to throw around some commands but for anything that needs a real terminal emulator I just open another xterm.