I've seen this situation but the players were right and the devs were braindead. It was LoL, of course. The champion was extremely OP and would stomp entire teams UNLESS someone picked a hard counter, in which case it became useless. It was broken: It didn't need buffs or nerfs, it needed a rework.

I honestly don't want balance in a game. Trying to make characters equal makes them all bland. Try making every character fun. It is a better concept.

While these kinds of 'fans' are usually wrong... It's not actually a self-contradictory stance to take.
Some characters do require a fundamental (and work-intensive) re-design to be suitable for the way the game is played. Buffing them just gives them more power to make the game unfun for everyone.

Well, players get emotionally attached to their favorite characters or classes. They care.

The crowd can be tough, but most of the time the dev's balance performance is indeed very poor. I've played plenty of competitive games and I can safely say the number of balance patches I saw that made sense were a tiny minority and there was always a forum poster making more sense than the devs.

You see the problem here is that it can be both.
Yuumi, from League of Legends, if a IRL example of the elf character: It is nerfed to the ground with less than 5% pick rate and 47% win rate yet if it is ever buffed at all ever her gameplay loop is unbalanced and really annoying for the community.

its the Mercy controversy all over again

2/2

These people, like the comic shows, don't want to make their game or community better. Lets ignore them and enjoy our games.

The thing is that outrage and anger sell (they drive engagement up), so these creators have an incentive to be as toxic as possible to grow their channels and make money.

The winning move is not to play their game, ignoring nonconstructive criticism. 1/2