shields have been an issue in the community, though namely as “feels bad to play” (especially for DPS players), and not as an issue due to the synergy of tanks.
GOATS were shut down because it eventually became “boring to watch” on OWL, and that there was generally no room for hitscan players.
double shields wouldn’t be such an issue if people are willing to switch off the “cool” heroes and play the shield breaking heroes, like junkrat or pharah… shields can be easily countered, many players just chose not to…
so the real reason here, really isn’t shields themselves, but whether or not players are wanting to play with it
GOATS was 3 tanks and 3 healers. The synergy was caused by many games potentially having 1 tank and needing to be powerful enough to survive against 4+ DPS. The same is true for healers - they needed to be able to solo heal, but stacking 3 healers made them superpowered. That issue was fixed by 222. Can give me a single example Blizzard saying 222 tank synergy was a problem?
The biggest problem from DPS players with 222 was long queue times. It makes sense to me that 5v5 would be a solution for that.
GOATS came because the team that ran it, GOATS, had no hitscan so they decided to run a comp that’s just so tanky that they can avoid the problem. This was against the period where it was pseudo-dive and after moth meta, where they ran winston/dva/widow/tracer/Lucio/Mercy. It was not used to survive 1/2/3 or even 1/4/1 comps.
The synergy however, was so good, easy to be done and pickup, it came to dominate the entire meta.
Laziness is 100% of the reason they did it because going from 6v6 to 5v5 has only one advantage and it’s easier balancing with fewer variables in play. The benefit is purely for the devs themselves, not players.
They obviously can’t admit that but there’s no way they can make the case cutting a position makes the game more fun or interesting. There’s literally less meta/comp flexibility than ever without tank pairing.
Games will be extremely predictable and even in the stream yesterday the games played out like deathmatches where each team breezed through objectives.
Tank synergy can be balanced separately to the rest of their team due to there always being 2 tanks per team. If Bliz wanted tanks and their synergies to be weak, they could easily do that without making the game 5v5.