There are some good points Chaos Magic made, eg being a meta framework for practice and thus teaching one skepticism and a way to banish (by laughter?)- by not to take serious any path, in case they should become too dangerous for example, also it at first was practical cause it simplified (essentialized) certain practices and made sometimes strange syncretistic combinations and thereby ideally would further creativity and new discoveries.
I share your criticism, also of Carroll who at the beginning had some good writings and then got boring and a bit redundant w his pseudo scientific jargon, as you noted (yet he paraded himself as the great scientist with a degree in front of the occult community, while in the scientific community his rep was more dubious, I'd believe, just as an occultist who happens to have a degree).
But where there is a trend there is also always a counter-trend or reaction, just as the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason gave birth to the Romantic movement, meaning the poetic overly abundant but still powerful streak of myth and adventure, as described in this essay, though maybe more in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way.
Spare's tradition, Kenneth Grant's writings, mythopoietic theories, also playing into the works of those artist-philosophers of the 20th century on the one side and more recently the grimoire fad and the reenlivening of cunning craft and traditional witchcraft on the other by ppl like Cochrane and Chumbley, latter of whom had also studied ethnology I believe, underfed by scientific theorists like Feyerabend or the ethnologist Hans Peter Duerr and fantasy authors like Lovecraft and (my recommendation) China Mieville or Thomas Ligotti would speak for this Romantic side.
There are some classics though that are worth looking into, in any case, eg Crowley already had all the characteristics of CM I mentioned in the first paragraph simply because he was modern and a sort of trailblazer + there are also the higher or deeper topics like the QBL, The Yi Jing, Tantric and/or Daoist practices that are always worth looking into.
In short: CM isn't a path, it's a metaframe work, CM as a path died of its own ubiquity since nearly all modern practitioners who don't want to be merely some sort of risible re-enactors and RPGs will have to apply (and have to an extent always applied- see eg witches and Sufis) some of its methods, like syncretism.
One could write thousands other thoughts like this one: CM is good for both the utter beginner and the advanced student: to the beginner it provides some simple striped down and easy to reproduce techinques (see Liber MMM, or Fries Visual Magic) to fascinate him, draw him in and 'convince' him that something is there, and to someone who can already operate more methods of various systems, it can be a safety anchor to fall back to or some middle position for respite and from which one can do new info gathering or research. etc