Is The Road Not Taken actually overrated as one of the most famous poems ever written?

[Weary Inlet]

Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken has become arguably the single most quoted, most anthologised and most instantly recognisable poem in the entire English language, printed on graduation cards, quoted in commencement speeches and referenced constantly in popular culture as a celebration of individualism and following your own unique path in life. Yet the poem's own actual text tells a considerably more ambiguous story, describing two paths through a yellowed wood that were, in Frost's own words, worn really about the same, with the speaker openly admitting near the end of the poem that he will likely tell the story of his choice with a sigh at some distant point in the future, a tone that reads as far more rueful and self deceiving than the straightforwardly inspirational reputation the poem has since acquired.

Defenders of the poem's popularity argue that its genuine ambiguity is exactly what makes it worth revisiting, and that the widespread misreading actually says more about how people naturally engage with poetry than it does about any actual flaw in Frost's original writing. Critics, meanwhile, argue that the poem's fame has become almost entirely divorced from its actual content at this point, reduced to a single motivational phrase that Frost himself apparently intended as gentle irony rather than genuine inspiration.

So is The Road Not Taken actually deserving of its status as one of the most famous poems ever written, or has its reputation become so distorted from what Frost actually wrote that the fame itself now feels somewhat undeserved?