I guess. I usually have a small enough one that I can squeeze under the seat. Even when I've had larger items that need to go overhead, the majority of the times it's within one row of where I'm sitting. The ones where I have to put it far away are the exception.
The problem is is the narrow-body "commuter" aircraft, which often only have enough overhead space for about 3/4 of all seats. Since most people have a carryon that needs overhead space, they often run out, and need to gatecheck your carry on.
The issue is that people don't like this, since it means more of a delay at the destination.
Also some airlines will through gate-check the bag, printing a full barcoded tag tied to your ticket, like all other checked begs. Other airlines, most notably American's regional carriers will instead "valet check" the bag, which means a little red tag is added that is not tied to you in any way, and at the destination they are supposed to separate out those bags, and hand them back on the jetbridge.
This means you will miss any connection that does not exceed the minimum connection time at the airport by a solid 10 minutes. Even worse is what happens if the baggage handler fails to notice the red tag. Then one of 3 things will happen:
1. It will get spit out at baggage claim. (I've had this happen once, albeit on a flight with no possible conections, so the bags skipped the sorting step and went straight to baggage claim.)
2. The bag reaches bag sorting, and because it does not have a proper checked tag with barcode will eventually get spit out for manual processing. An airport employee notices the red "American valet checked" tag, and delivers it to the American baggage office, where you can try to reclaim it with the little stub that you hopefully remembered to remove from the tag.
3. The little red tag got ripped off at some point in the process. If this happens you probably won't get your bag back. If the employee who checks unclaimed bags for identification actually does their job, you might get it back (assuming you have filled out the address card on your luggage), but sadly in practice that almost seems to the the exception instead of the rule.
