Despite those talents in the old Outdoorsmanship category, it did not intend for you to be a melee hunter. You still had all your ranged abilities, and you still wanted to use those over melee ones whenever possible.
In short, prior to Legion, the class was not designed to favor melee combat over ranged combat, at any point.
Correct on the first two.
Survival however, did not focus on melee.
It focused on survivability and utility.
It was the same with the prior version that was Outdoorsmanship.
They took that general design away as it wasn’t very useful. Most of the talents weren’t actually good. They weren’t good enough to be considered in most parts of the game(compared to other talents).
Pretty much this.