When I last used OpenSCAD, I found it rather lacking.

Basic things like 'hollow this object out, leaving a 3mm shell' are nearly impossible.

Anything non-trivial takes minutes or hours to compile, making debugging really hard.

Are these newer tools better?

Yeah, I think that's a consequence of how they're constructing the objects. But things like signed distance fields make that easier* because it'd just be "expand the SDF by 3mm" - https://github.com/fogleman/sdf has `shell` for this.

* if you can wrap your head around the math/geometry, I guess