For years I only bought clear boxes for the obvious stuff, off season clothes, Christmas decorations, and kept everything else in whatever mismatched tubs I already owned. What changed my mind was moving house and realizing I'd packed a box labeled "misc" that turned out to be seven phone chargers, a single rollerblade and a bag of picture hooks. If I could have seen through the side, I'd have known in two seconds. Now almost everything goes in clear.
These work best in places where you're hunting for things under pressure, hall closets, under beds, the garage shelf you can only reach with a step stool, the back of a kid's wardrobe where seasonal clothes live for months at a time. They're especially good in rented places where you can't build in proper storage and need something that looks tidy stacked in a corner rather than shoved out of sight. Where they struggle is anywhere damp or unheated, an attic that gets cold enough to make the plastic brittle, or a shed that bakes in summer, because most clear plastic will eventually go cloudy or crack under real temperature swings, and once it's cloudy you've lost the entire point of buying it. I've also learned not to use them for anything heavy and awkward, like books, since the thinner clear ones can bow in the middle and the lids pop off when you try to stack three high.
Day to day, they hold up fine. Spills wipe off without staining the way fabric bins do, and a year of being dragged in and out of a closet hasn't left mine scratched enough to matter, though the really cheap ones scuff and haze faster than you'd expect, especially on the base where they slide across shelving. After a house move mine came through better than most of my furniture, no cracked corners, no warped lids, which is more than I can say for the cardboard boxes I used for everything else. The one place they genuinely clash is with any kind of styled, closed storage look, floating shelves with baskets, linen cabinets, anywhere you want the room to look calm rather than inventoried, because clear boxes show every bit of mess inside them, and a shelf of clear boxes full of odds and ends can look busier than no system at all.
When you're choosing one, check the lid first, not the box. A lid that clips down on all four sides will outlast a flat one that just sits on top, especially once you start stacking.