The other thing you do get on Kickstarter if you don't have much of an audience to begin with is more reach/visibility. I ran a Kickstarter for my last graphic novel and would totally do it again, because as well as the predictable pledges from the core group of people who back my Patreon and have bought all my webcomic stuff, I also got some new people buying my books and following my Patreon. So that was nice. I'd do it again.

I just set the goal reeaaaallly low, because all I was doing was individual copies via print-on-demand, so I was like "... how many of these do I KNOW I can sell" and then set my goal to like ... I forget now, $800 or something, and then had the pledge-per-copy at what would be a reasonable price if I were selling them as individual copies. It wasn't a lot of work or stress, and it worked out great. I think the place where people run into trouble is when they ask for like $40K and then fall down a hole of trying to flog the Kickstarter broadly enough and get high enough pledges to actually make that much money. If you're realistic-erring-on-the-low-side about how much you think you can make, you get some extra reach/free advertising + an easy money-handling system that doesn't cost you much, and it all works out pretty well.

It's basically just a tool like anything else; it depends on how people use it.