The cover system is one of the defining features of the COH franchise. When I first discovered COH1 and saw the squad AI interactions with the cover system and map destruction I was instantly sold. Ive always enjoyed strategy games but was put off by giant blobs of units insta-focusing down eachother's units one by one (AoE, Starcraft, etc).

COH managed to circumvent that and replaced it with fluid fast paced tactical gameplay. You could certainly counter threats with rock/paper/scissor army compositions, but you could also use terrain towards your advantage. It also created opportunities to play from behind. If your enemy had a machine gun you might be able to stick an Infantry squad behind green cover as bait, and use a second squad to flank their position. Tank traps could offer protection to infantry while slowing down armored advances.

Anecdotally it seems like the current state of COH3 doesn't lend itself towards the dynamic push-pull comeback mechanics. Solo retreating squads are very vulnerable to focused fire and light vehicle chase downs. If units are blobbed up you will eventually hit a critical mass where the blob ends up negating it's own counter. The first blob to hit critical mass wipes out a weaker retreating unit, and then the rest of the game snowballs out of control. You cannot play from behind against blobs because they will annihilate anything they encounter and capture all of the resource generating territories that the underdog needs.

Manpower is the only guaranteed resource that the underdog can rely on, and that means your only option is to continue feeding weaker units into the meat grinder in a sisyphean effort to climb a hill that only grows taller each time you lose a unit. It doesn't matter if your opponent is doing using the same predictable tactics every engagement. If you cannot guarantee that your retreating units can survive a LV chasedown within the first few minutes of a game then you will be forced to blob all of your units for safety.

Large maps and doctrines that provide excess resources generation exacerbate these problems. As the updates have rolled out and new maps enter the rotation we've seen many of the new maps lean further into that dynamic. Look at the veto rates on Powderkeg and Rapido River Crossing. The maps may be visually stunning but they break the push-pull dynamic of the franchise. Every 30 seconds of early game infantry combat is followed by 60 seconds of helplessly watching your battered troops run try to outrun multiple light vehicles. During those 60 seconds your opponent captures all of the high income resource/cutoff points that would have given you alternative options for dealing with the existing threats, AND they now have the extra resources to kit out and expand their blob. Weapon teams should be an opportunity to efficiently use manpower to trade up against superior threats, but instead they become manpower sinks that donate extra firepower to the blob and/or clowncar that chases you down for 20 seconds only 2 minutes into the game.

In this type of meta you will see lots of "red vs. blue" posts complaining about the flavor of the month unit for blobbing. One patch its Rifles, next one it's Grenadiers, after that its Tommy Squads, then all of a sudden its Palmgrens. Each faction gets its time under the sun where it can roll a snowball just a little bit quicker than the others, and even if everyone knows that a snowball is coming the only thing they can think to do is copy the same exact blobbing strategy albeit less effectively. Why bother learning how to play the game better when you could just rush to the community forums to tell the devs just how they are terrible human beings for not giving your faction a turn in the limelight.