I compose a little, and when I've spoken with cellists, they almost all prefer tenor clef over treble clef except when playing in the extreme upper register.

The reason is that high passages, if written in treble clef, often dip low enough to require ledger lines below the staff. And changing back and forth between bass and treble quickly is awkward.

Alto clef works well for viola because the range is squarely between the treble and bass clefs. A viola part written in treble clef could go more than an octave below the staff. If written in treble and bass, it would require switching clefs constantly.

Choice of clefs should avoid the things most likely to cause confusion. What I hate the most is lots of ledger lines -- it's too easy to miscount them. The second-worst thing is switching clefs every few notes. So the goal with cello (which in fact uses treble clef as well) and viola (alto and treble clefs) is to minimize ledger lines without an unreasonable number of clef changes.

Historically, the C clef (alto and tenor) is actually the oldest clef. If you look at early written music in the medieval era and early Renaissance, everything is in C clefs.

As long as the clefs being used are all commonly used for the instrument, it works fine.

But musicians do get annoyed when they have to read a clef they almost never see. Trombonists dislike Schumann because he (and hardly anyone else) tended to write high trombone parts in alto clef; they're used to reading bass and tenor.

Gordon Shumway said
I thought I posted something about flutes here? They seem to get used to lots of ledger lines. And some violin music is probably full of them.

I can't remember how many you get in piano music. But for those who are afraid of them, you don't really count them. Once you are in key and in the right place and playing a melody, what you actually do is detect when the melody is ascending a tone, when descending, and so on.

  

That only works as long as the intervals are small. If you're playing viola and you have two beats of rest to jump about two octaves up to the D above the treble clef, you really don't want to still be reading that in alto clef. You'd be going from the middle of the alto clef staff all the way to five ledger lines at once. That's when a switch to treble clef helps immensely.

(Encountered that in February. Julia Perry, Study for Orchestra. There's a similar leap of almost 2 octaves to C above the treble clef in Carlos Chavez's Sinfonia India, which I played in November 2018 -- at least that leap is in slow tempo, but it would still not be fun to read in alto clef.)