So this one is more for web devs out there, but is Adobe Experience Manager as popular in the enterprise works as my boss claims? I've never heard of it getting used much, and I don't hear about it in web development circles.

I never heard of it being used in larger style companies.

Yeah. Nike, Time Warner, NASA, Under Armor, Converse, Etc use it. It's usually used for experiences and authoring fragments though. The problem you run into is the delivery mechanism doesn't have to be AEM. So it's not like AEM is a web server serving up the content all the time. Sometimes it's just publishing some authored content to a feed and something else is putting on the page.

Forms are used a lot since Lifecycle is EOL, but you don't always see that externally. Sometimes it's internal usage.