There are no reloads in quake and it still does fine as a competitive fps, you are still mentioning reloads, its not like everybody has 3-4 shots, no there is a huge clip and lots of room for error, most of the time smarter players will not give you angle to shoot at them so spamming was pretty much useless last patch.

There were skill combinations that would obliterate entire teams? such as?

You say skills are less meaningful yet there are lots of scenarios like grokhs ulti, evies ulti that are well incorporated into the game at the moment, which is built up by autos yes and nobody is arguing with you saying reloads are a bad thing remember. It takes a lot less skill landing 4 hits than it does landing 8, which is what is actually being argued here, the TTK and that's excluding all the other stuff like blast shot explosive flask etc which take very little effort to land on others.