I am not going speak for all historians, but I think the views towards Mao in my experiences with academics dealing with modern China are that he was overall a pretty poor leader. He was a destructive personality and rolled back many of the successes of people such as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping.

Before I go further, I think I will recommend two books on his period of political dominance that are illustrative of his policies and personality. These are China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed by Andrew G. Walder and Mao's Last Revolution by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals. With the absence of any kind of authoritative biography of Mao Zedong, I believe these two books are fairly essential in trying to understand the person and his views.

What they paint a picture of is not a crazy person like some people may be inclined to think, but rather a person who let his ideologies trump any kind of logical reasoning about policy. The GLF is really a good example of this. There was a "honeymoon" period after the communist party won the civil war and the country was in fact doing pretty well for the first few years under the new government. The economic policy was not one of collectivization at this point. However, Mao became impatient with how slow the country was transitioning to communism, and pushed through his GLF. This was devastating as we all know. Liu and Deng eventually took over economic policy to clean up the mess and Mao was actually becoming less popular in the party due to it. The fact was that millions and millions of people had died, and everyone in the party knew which people at the top had driven it forward, even if they were too scared to say so. This mistake did not change Mao though. He still believed in revolution of the masses, and his anger at Liu and Deng (who had the gall to openly oppose him) was a driving force in the Cultural Revolution. Again, he put his ideology and personal squabbles ahead of the lives of thousands of people.

These books really paint a picture of a very manipulative (but definitely very intelligent) Mao Zedong and an absurdly incompetent group of leaders in the party. I think here of the ridiculous smear campaign against the wife of Lin Biao, Ye Qun, which was led by Lu Dingyi's wife Yan Weibang. Lin was accused of being a cuckold and Ye a woman of easy virtue. Further, Lin wrote a note testifying to Ye's virginity, faithfulness, legitimate nature of his children, and condemning of Yan. Lu denied knowledge of the letters, Lin asked how that could be, and Lu asked that "Aren't there quite a few husbands who don't really know what their wives are up to?" Lin threatened to kill him right there at the Politburo session (this is my summary of a section from MacFarquhar and Schoenhals). Just one example of an innumerable amount of Mao leading a group of individuals who were completely unaware or willfully ignorant of the effects of their rule. These were the kinds of people who were leading the largest country in the world!

Anyways, Mao was seemingly incapable of using empirical evidence to formulate decisions and policy. He was a hardline ideologue, and it caused massive death and destruction (including destruction of Chinese culture on the mainland, arguably), as well as a serious crumbling of the economy. Liu and Deng patched it up after the GLF, then Mao accused them of being political enemies, and then Deng cleaned up again after Mao died. Mao is a contentious figure in the PRC among the populace even today, and the party actually in a roundabout way denounced his policies after he died.