It has its fans and I can see why. Personally, I wasn't a fan of it even on release but I appreciate its good points. It has some utterly stunning songs like SI and BOTH (best cover of her career I feel) but its bogged down by a lot of urban filler with unremarkable production and of course, those whisper vocals. Lyrically, its a very solid album with emotive, insightful and clear storytelling. The next album she did that matched it was MIAM, over a decade later.
I've come to feel CB actually gets better retrospectively in the lifespan of her catalogue.
It was, at the time, a bit of an uneventful album (at a time we needed an event) but in hindsight was the last real classic Mariah Carey album formula before TEOM reignited her sound (and the industry) before the downward spiral of popculture phrases, song rehashes and sing/speak delivery structures over melody we saw in E=MC2 and Memoirs.