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I've always been told to trust the decisions of the person who coded the documentclass, when it comes to typesetting. Questions about what emphasized text should look like or whether a paragraph should be indented are supposed to be left to someone else. However, the guidance I've been given on figure environments and other floats is basically to ignore what Latex is doing and try to fight with it as much as possible. This feels somewhat foolish to me - if the default behaviour is so bad, why isn't this behaviour fixed by the documentclass authors? It's not as if it's that complicated to figure out.

Anonymous
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    Not sure if your question is not too opinion-based. My personal and intuitive opinion is that when you have relatively (to the amount of text) many figures then it is a hard problem to have a "good" figure placement that fulfills all kinds of expectations such as minimizing white space, having the figure placer after it is mentioned and other things (that I am not aware of). Honestly, I place figures most of the time manually using the [H] placement option provided by the float package despite this being a non-popular choice among the experts on this site (I am not an expert). – Dr. Manuel Kuehner Dec 04 '21 at 20:26
  • well I don't who told you that. The default behaviour is not always perfect but for many documents quite good. For more info what happens see https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/39020/2388. – Ulrike Fischer Dec 04 '21 at 20:27
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    Does this answer your question? How to influence the position of float environments like figure and table in LaTeX?. I know that your question is not a literal duplicate but the answer is maybe still relevant. Thanks @UlrikeFischer. – Dr. Manuel Kuehner Dec 04 '21 at 20:28
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    give an example where you think the current algorithm results in a bad placing (there are some) and then perhaps there could be an answer discussing why that is a hard case. As it is I voted to close the question as "opinion based" as there can be no answer to it as written. Note the algorithm is mostly encoded in the latex format, document class authors can parameterise it to an extent, as can document authors. – David Carlisle Dec 04 '21 at 20:47
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    actually the most common answer to the question in the title is "because the document author specified constraints that were not sensible" notably using \begin{figure}[h] at a point where "here" is not allowed, so disallowing the float being placed anywhere. – David Carlisle Dec 04 '21 at 20:55

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