Was the A10 really that bad back then, or did Acer nerf it with poor cooling or slow ram? I remember a time when the A series chips were a good buy, but that may have been substantially earlier than 2016
Probably both. I've never been impressed with any A series CPU. They've always seemed far slower than they should be for their specifications. Back in the early 2010s everybody was excited the AMD was going to be coming out with multicore bulldozers and pile drivers. But they bombed out pretty hard. And he made some choices that made sense at the time but didn't pan out. They fixed it with the Ryzen.
The AMD Bulldozer architecture was really not great. And the updates weren't much better. Zen was a huge improvement.
The integrated GPUs were always significantly better than Intel, and sometimes the pricing was great, but if you wanted good CPU performance, in that time frame, you needed an Intel and the latest "core" architecture was usually the right choice. And then Intel stalled around Skylake/Kaby Lake.