I strongly agree, with a big caveat. There’s massive variation among honors colleges. At my son’s school for example (Cal Poly), it made no sense. Classes are already small and all professor taught. The only advantage there is early registration, which is a big advantage, but he was a year ahead, so registered early anyway. He elected not to join when invited because it would have added 10 unrelated hours to his curriculum. Ditto Utah, except classes are not small and discussions and labs are TA taught. It also added 10 hours. The big advantage there is the Marriott dorm…unparalleled at any university we visited, and we visited a lot! 
The perfect representation is Oregon State. Their honors classes replace curriculum required classes and go into fairly advanced levels. Teachers compete to be chosen for those classes. They are small. Essentially it’s the Cal Poly experience at Oregon State (with rain instead of the ocean 
).
I hear Barrett at ASU is quite good, but don’t have first hand experience.
Stuart Nachbar at Educated Quest has a nice article on the pros and cons of honors colleges. https://educatedquest.com/the-upside-and-downside-of-public-honors-colleges/