To me the pulse laser is a weapon whose niche is in attacking smaller ships, and in that role it is effective because it has high accuracy, shot speed, high enough damage to deal with frigate/light destroyer armor, high dps, and is good enough vs shields. For targets with light armor, its a "no finesse" weapon to go up against: you can't win by taking shots on either armor or shields, so there's no way to mitigate the incoming damage - kind of like the plasma cannon for larger ships (the pulse laser has better efficiency and better dps/OP than the plasma cannon... it just can't deal with heavy armor!).
I like to use the pulse laser on tempest/wolves (least bad option)/glimmer/pirate mules (in the early game), on the back mediums of a paragon (to deal with flanking frigates and fighters), and on medusas. Depending somewhat on what I'm going up against. I have in a pinch used them on Falcons and Eagles as anti-small ship/assault weapons, and they worked well enough there, but the synergy between phase lances and kinetics is too high and pushes the pulse laser out (not to mention that Falcons/Eagles I'm expecting to fight larger ships in the mid to late game).
In terms of anti shield DPS, its not bad at 300. Thats more than an HVD, and more than many HAC's because of missing so many shots. The flux efficiency of 1.0 is worse than both of those weapons which matters a lot for symmetric contests - Wolves struggle 1v1 vs anything with shields, even kites, because they just don't have enough flux to run a pulse laser, but I'd argue that more a Wolf problem than a pulse laser problem (Grievous mentioned this in that the nature of high tech ships doesn't always work well with the pulse laser, and I'd say this is true for wolves that are trying to 1v1 things).
Its terrible vs high armor which makes it a bad choice for ships that need to deal with that! Otoh, there are 2 other weapons of the same size class that are good at heavy armor: the heavy blaster and the phase lance. And also missiles if the ship has access to those.