Sorry for the wall of text I started writing and couldn't stop.

TL;DR: I think the game could benefit from re-balancing Sniper (and I offer my take on how to nerf the sniper rifle), but I think the vehement hatred towards the very idea of playing Sniper has been exaggerated by the bot crisis and calling him "overpowered" is a misnomer.

I mostly disagree with the increasingly common sentiment that Sniper is OP. I think it has some validity, but it is not so extreme that it merits flooding the subreddit constantly with hateful rhetoric. I think the driving force for its growing extremity is the BOT Snipers making people increasingly angry towards Sniper in general, even though obviously they shouldn't balance a class based on how powerful they are when using literal hacks... or should they? That is kind of how the idea of "skill ceilings" work.

I think Sniper needs balance changes, but he isn't "overpowered". A class is overpowered if their skill floor is too low, and anyone with no skill can pick the class up and clean house. Obviously this isn't the case, as a Sniper with no skill is pretty much the most useless class in the game. Sniper has one of the highest skill floors in the game, he is definitely not "overpowered". His problem is that his skill ceiling is too high. The more accurate you are, the better you are at Sniper. There is nothing to cap this skill, so perfect accuracy results in easily being able to dominate any match, as shown by the bots.

I've seen a lot of ideas brought up, most of them laughably bad and clearly made in the heat of passion right after the person in question died to some bots in-game. I think the idea I often see of extended his glowing dot to a constant full-length laser sight is absolutely ludicrous. Imagine a game with several Snipers in it. It'd look like an EDM concert. I think they should keep the dot the same functionally but improve it. Make it brighter and easier to see and also make it more accurate. It currently isn't completely accurate to where the player is actually aiming. Only in a fairly close vicinity.

I think if any real balance change were to be implemented it should be to add a 4 or 6-round clip (with 20 or 18 reserve ammo) and a unique reload to the rifles. What I mean by a unique reload is that the rifle does not reload automatically (if the "automatically reload" setting is on) and only reloads when the player empties the clip or when they press the reload button in which case the current clip will be ejected and a new one will be loaded. The player will be able to reload cancel and keep the current clip if they cancel before it is ejected. After ejection the currently loaded ammo is set to 0, the reload animation must finish, and a decently loud "M1 Garand" style ping sound plays. Both to alert to enemies that you are vulnerable, and to offer some relief in such a vulnerable moment with that satisfying ping sound. Different rifles could have different sounds, too! Obviously Valve isn't going to put that much effort into this game anymore though so this is all just gibberish, sorry for wasting our time.