Unlike most contemporary elites, he was clearly genuine in his affection for the poor and downtrodden and not just virtue signalling to feel better about himself.
On the other hand, he was a prototypical example of elite sentiment in the 2010s: extremely willing to embrace the ever-more left-wing zeitgeist on issues ranging from gay rights over abortion to climate and migration, while being personally insulated from the adverse effects and blind to all the collateral damage these policies cause for the unwashed masses.
I would say pope Francis was a good man acting in good faith, but he was not effective at using the power of his position to actually make the world a better place.
Yeah there are a lot of ivory tower liberals who have supported self-flagellating geopolitics when its self-serving as a virtue signal or as a moral bludgeon against political opponents, but rather than kiss a pauper's feet these are the guys over on /r/anticonsumption who did a brainstorm session on how to boycott the entire nation of El Salvador so they can use their entitled first world purchasing power to punish the peasants who make their t-shirts in sweat shops. Pope Francis definitely stood apart as someone who's sentiments were genuine and considered, divorced from self-concern. That doesn't mean he was right about everything, the selfless or intelligent can be just as wrong as the callous or moronic.
Pope Francis served the church at a time of fair weather. We don't know what the future will hold, but was he steering in the right direction? The winds changed hard on topics like migration in his time and I think if he had lived another few years he'd see raising tensions with the orthodox church to be short sighted. I think its comparable to American presidents who had the benefit of starting and ending with peacetime and prosperity but still have debatable consequences for the long term stability of the country, and those preceding the civil war certainly got their share of historical blame. Meanwhile we've had popes faced with times of true challenges and compromises like Pius XII where we still have debates over whether he could have saved more people or been more proactive in opposing Nazism, and if he had, would he have wound up saving less people if Mussolini or Hitler had restrained him. Francis didn't face these kinds of stakes, but he wasn't steering the church away from the newest wave of Nazis either.