I think that on the front of moment-to-moment combat and engagement, we're in a really good place — there's a lot of weapons that are viable or strong, so I get to fight dualies and swords and sloshers and blasters and chargers and rollers and chargers and splatlings and very occasionally tents (lol), in addition to standard shooter v shooter...there's a lot of different weapons to fight and they all feel different to fight.
in this sense, I think the game is in an amazing place, and there's tons of variation and it's fun and healthy
however, I think people have the tendency to see weapon variety and conclude that the meta is "diverse"
where this meta sucks hot garbage is that there's only really one overarching strategy, because the maps are hot trash and there are no specials that give a good answer to fighting coolered people
in particular, the strategy is "pop some random specials + cooler and run tf in and fight with strong main weapons"
even if you don't run cooler, you're just doing the same thing without the insurance + mobility boost from cooler
in this sense, strategically, the game is very boring, because no special or weird combo of weapons has a large enough impact to allow you to play the game in a different way. cooler is just this like, massive black hole of maximum consistency for minimum effort and there's nothing that can escape it
my team oftentimes doesn't run cooler but it still doesn't feel like we have much of a different strategy other than "fight w good mains that can handle them even if they're coolered"
the good news is that at least the main-weapon-focused meta means that i GET to feel that weapon diversity (vs, say, missile spammer 1 vs missile spammer 483, and i don't care which weapon it is cuz im not even fighting them), but I just wish cooler was a little less stupid to allow for more interesting counterplay.
right now, it's not rock paper scissors, it's just scissors-scissors-scissors with a knife sharpener (cooler is the knife sharpener) -- cooler does not exist as part of the ecosystem of things with counterplay, it's just a thing that gives a universal boost with no interesting RPS dynamics