The old school solutions lack any sort of javascript support (per the docs, htmldoc doesn't even support css), so they wouldn't work for a lot of real world websites. That's not really the same use case.
A better comparison would be against the likes of wkhtmltopdf[0], which uses webkit, or the pdf generation features of phantomjs.
Yep, that's about how I remember it. It was such a pain to build on Windows (especially to get a single static binary) that people contributing fixes would often attain hero status by attaching a random binary to an issue. Specifically, GIF support was broken on the official Windows build for 4+ years:
A better comparison would be against the likes of wkhtmltopdf[0], which uses webkit, or the pdf generation features of phantomjs.
[0] https://wkhtmltopdf.org/