No, but Boost is one giant bear of dependency with lots of duplication with STL. Personally I prefer to use tiny includable file / lib for specific functionality that I need rather than keep that bear on my real estate.
Boost is not monolithic, nor are any of the sub-parts especially huge (like ... asio is big because an asynchrony system is a big project; regex is small because it can be). Nor, as other commenters have pointed out, is including those dependencies particularly onerous; many are single-file or just a handful of files.
I suspect your criticism has more to do with "one giant bear of dependency". Which: fair enough. Getting Boost set up is a pain; the pain does not reduce if you only want to use one sub-part of it, because you still have to use b2, their custom build language and associated cmake-ish system (yuck!) to prepare it (there are ways to avoid this, but they are not well-supported). Even CMake's (pretty good!) Boost discovery/inclusion support can only conceal that weirdness to a point, and often breaks in unexpected environments--well, breaks more often than the average CMake setup, which breaks a lot...
Similarly, getting your IDE to understand boost's presence can be tricky since many IDEs (looking at you VS) have overly-opinionated ways of incorporating it that don't jive well with how a CLI/portable project build system pulls it in.
But the first and second paragraphs aren't the same thing. Initial setup pains are real and suck, but the initial setup pains and the overhead/monolithic-ness of actually using boost in your projects once it's set up are another. Initial setup pain is largely a one-time or infrequent cost, and the infrequency of that cost should be weighed against the not-inconsiderable convenience of Boost as a tool.
Not saying it's universally worth it; for some projects (especially ones that need to be built on a wide variety of environments, though this is rarer than most people, even some project authors, think) it's not appropriate. But many of the standard criticisms of Boost's runtime utility are specious.
I'll point out that if you're using header-only portions of Boost, you don't have to build Boost. Lots (most?) of Boost is header-only. You can just download the tarball and include headers out of it. It's barely even a dependency. Of all the deps my C++ app has, Boost is the easiest; I just download and extract and it's done, no build step. I don't need the actual compiled library; only the headers.
Using only the header-only stuff is super easy; there's no deciphering or extracting at all. You just include the headers and _don't_ link the Boost library and see if it builds. If it doesn't, then I guess that wasn't a header-only library. You're not building or installing Boost at all; you're just downloading a copy of the headers. Only the template instantiations you actually use will end up in your binary.
(This sounds flippant but it's literally how I use boost in real life. Why decipher when the compiler can just tell you?)
not to mention that the documentation is generally utterly awful, with mostly only reference-style function documentation without exposition but manually distributed across lots of small 1-page paragraphs.
Doxygen was a great step forwards when it came out, but C++ documentation doesn’t seem to have evolved since, and it only fulfills the “reference” pillar of documentation.
Rust’s books (mdbook?) are amazing. Lots of libraries have good, clear documentation explaining how to use the library, on top of the automatic docs.rs output (which I still sometimes find difficult to navigate, but think is just my incomplete understanding). I have no idea how the community has managed to consistently achieve this.
I once tried to use a library that used boost and since I didn’t want to require my code to need the entirety of boost (which is gigabytes in size!) I tried to extract just the parts of boost that were needed. There are so many interdependencies between sublibraries of boost that after about two hours I decided I will never again use any library that relied on boost.
