They’re fine. In pve you normally won’t main tank in raids but you can tank in them.
Best AOE tank in the game and one of the best AOE farmers as well. you can actually spec into prot while leveling and AOE grind in addition to tanking instances.
You’d be better as Ret in pvp due to burst and offspec into holy for support, but prot pallies counter warriors and rogues pretty hard. They lack any real range against casters, however.
Ignore the forum hero’s. Most of them are running on private server meta assumptions. Which have been proven wrong several times by both blizzard and other evidence such as old YouTube vids.