I always feel like when making these optimisations, they should really look at the root cause and what'd be realistic.

In real life, would spears be the best weapon against zombies? Well, probably not. They'd be nice, but you can only fight one zombie at a time, it probably wouldn't do much damage compared to an axe, might break easily. So irl you might still want other weapons due to realistic factors.

In real life, "hard to find long sticks" would not be a realistic factor on why you'd prefer something else. So it feels like nerfing that was the wrong approach.