I used to play the zoo build and I liked throwing pets.
However, I was well aware that many Hunters didn't like it. When the zoo build became a thing complaints were all about how stupid it looked to be throwing pets nonstop, partly because the animation looks dumb. Some people used Dire Frenzy, even during the tiers where it was clearly the wrong choice to do so.
For for reason, some Hunters also don't like having pet abilities do most of their damage because it makes them feel like their arrows are useless. I say they shouldn't be playing BM, but the amount of people complaining about it seems significant.
Barbed Shot is a fake shot, it does almost no damage but it fools some people into thinking that you are shooting hence you are doing the damage. It's the Blizzard way to make Dire Frenzy into a "new" spell, but it's really the same as Dire Frenzy used to be, with a weaker direct damage portion. The scaling changes made autoattacks stronger, so the stacking buff is more important than it was during Legion, but that has nothing to do with the change of Dire Frenzy to Barbed Shot.