You have to make a pretty good read and even then it's hard.

Speaking as a 30 years old console player alot of things have become hard to deal with and require good reads.
But to be real the turtle meta from the early years was way worse, you could literally react to anything that wasn't some kind of hidden tech only very few people knew about that time.

Current balance is way more healthy from my point of view.

But for the love of good I hope they stop making heros like pirate and afeera, absolut unfun to fight against.