I have a extreme no life amount of hours in TF2 so I got a lot of play time in that game
To this day, I still feel Valve has a very underappreciated design philosophy that many other games scrap or don’t appreciate:
Their focus is largely fun. If you read into their patch notes and design commentary they make it abundantly clear multiple times that a class has to be fun to play as, and fun to play against.
Even dying has to feel good in their opinion.
They design their game around that philosophy. When a weapon feels really unfun to play against, they rework it (see: Sandman. They said being stunned was not fun, losing control of your character is not a enjoyable mechanic so they got rid of it)
What we’re left with is a game that is not only balanced, but FUN
In Overwatch you can’t go a single round without being stunned, rooted, or losing some form of control of your movement or character. In TF2 you’ll get stunned, what, once every 30 hours of game play? If at that, even?
And the 24 players too is very nice. In current Overwatch if so much as 1 teammate is dead weight you’re done for. In TF2 you can have multiple awful players on your team but you’re not held back immensely by them since there’s 12 people per team.
Thanks to the 12 people per team, utter steamrolls where they do happen can still be fun. In Overwatch its just depressing.