The typical alternative that people need to be guided away from is one of the for-profit "career" schools that doesn't have transferable credits and is way more expensive than community college.
I think I can count on one hand the kids who actually transferred to a 4-year university and finished their bachelors degree.
I guess dropping out of a community college is a less costly misfire than dropping out of an expensive 4-year university, but anecdotally the people who went straight to university tended to stay there and finish. Obviously, this wasn't a controlled study and the university crew were probably more academically-minded to start with, but it is an observation.
I think there are many positives to attend a community college first but there are also several drawbacks that need to be acknowledged.
My daughter's freshmen dorm roommate should have stayed home. She spent much of her time pining for her boyfriend at home, rarely doing anything outside of class. She got pregnant by the boyfriend and now is dropped out. Kind of a bummer really, she is an under-represented minority who had a full-ride for Chemical Engineering.
Overspending to make a big commitment to something in the hopes that leads to success is generally, on average, terrible advice, in my opinion, even if you think there's some example of it working for somebody at some time.
I agree with the parent comment, the people in community college will tend to be less ambitious and it will likely affect you. This is not a knock on community college folks, it's just different people have different priorities.
I do think that there are many states with excellent public universities that are a comparably great bargain, especially if you can get scholarships.
I never even realized there was this negativity towards community college until recently, but I suspect it at some level amounts to astroturfing by their competitors, the miserable for-profit career schools that are everywhere. People will make bad decisions; I did after high school, but it's unconscionable to play on their vanity or low self esteem, telling them they're not good enough for a real college or that a real college isn't good enough for them, either way.
