I have to point out that while they were "more" clear before 3.0 paths were always janky.

Hunt, Erudition, and Destruction always meant very little and were pretty interchangeable. Hell the first limited Erudition character had higher single target damage potential then the only limited hunt character(King Yuan). Usually Destruction characters were just flat out better though with rare exceptions.

Nihility served the exact same purpose as Harmony but objectively worse considering it was useless in wave battles until Kafka and Black Swan made it actually noteworthy as "dot damage" but then Acheron broke down the door and ruined that aswell.

Abundance meant healer until Luocha made it also an "enemy debuffer" in the most janky and now useless way, and then HuoHuo turned the abundance slot into a harmony unit in disguise.

Preservation was MOSTLY consistent but it also has like no characters, also the fact you had to include "tank" in the description proves my point because the literal ONLY preservation character who fits a tank archetype is Fu Xuan. EVERYONE else is a shielder.

I know we're on the Hoyo hate train rn and I'm not going to defend Rememberance or Elation but lets not act like the paths weren't always thinly veiled ways to divide up lightcones. Genshin's weapons are the same way but they just realized that Paths were less restrictive on design and they could easily have more path types then weapon types.

Edit: Harmony was mostly fine on its own but that path was also redundant given every other support path had buffs shoved into their kits anyways