I love the A-10, but it's a plane born in the 70s and is not meant to survive the current generation of IADS. The only reason it's still in service is that it prooved to be astonishingly good in COIN operation, but the F-35 can still fill in that role barring minor problems like loiter time.
The golden era of the first Desert Storm are hardly a valid example of its capabilities, since the airspace was entirely in control of the coalition and no real IADS existed after the first SEAD strikes got rid of most of it. I doubt Russia (or China) would capitulate the skies so easily as Iraq did back then. And besides, that whole campaign was flown with an hard deck of 10000ft, the exact opposite of what an A-10 is expected to do. The only scenario where I see the A-10 being actually useful in an all out war is the ipothetic clash of the two Koreas, since North Korea has a pretty old military, and its IADS mostly consists of AAA and MANPADS.
The 30mm gun is amazing, but probably also overkill nowadays. You wouldn't see the A-10 hitting tank columns in case of big wars anyways, since they would be blown out of the skies by SAMs long before that.
The F-35 is the future, and no amount of bad press will change that. Newspapers have to sell, websites need clicks, and TV channels need views: negative news always bring more audience than positive ones. Let's not forget this is the first big military project born and raised under the internet era, I'd be curious to see what the comments on the F-16 could have been if the interconnected world we live in now existed at the time of its development.