Is this Mastery/Talent philosophy good in theory but bad in practice?

Ok, so i played WoW when it received an almost identical revamping of the talent trees as the mastery trees did in 6.22.

Which for one was the very start of WoW's subscribe decline... It was towards the end of Wotlk and then majorly reinforced in Cata. It locked you into a single talent tree, and then left you with a few extra points to go into another tree. They said they wanted to remove the mundane boring talents and replace them with "fun" talents which provided bigger effects.

This sounds fine, except the side effect is that you can no longer mix half talent specs (something like a hybrid druid in wow), and get a meaningful result, because all of the "exciting" and powerful talents are put so far up the tree if you don't split your points exactly how they want you to, then you're shooting yourself in the foot.

Enough about wow, back to league. So yes, one clear difference is that you're not being locked into a tree once you put the first point in, but you still always end up going to the end, because of this massive benefit you wouldn't receive otherwise. Then because every intermediate teir is more powerful than the previous ones, you'd almost never do something like (18/6/6), and because most important masteries are located at the bottom you can't even think of trying a (12/12/6) build.

This problem is only more amplified in league of legends, where 39 masteries are trying to fulfill the needs of 127 (and growing) different champions. If there was a problem with old masteries, it was that they didn't offer enough different viable options for all the champions, not that it offered to many niche options.

The point is that niche options are not a bad thing, and i don't understand why ghostcrawler seems to think they are. Niche choices with small singular impacts, but large overarching impacts is a much better way to design a mastery/talent system in my option. Having a lot of small stat boosts offers much more diversity than a few big power dumps, because it doesn't literally or artificially lock you into the specific play style which benefits from those limited powerful options.

Yeah, with a very complex general talent system you will get a lot of cookie cutter builds which are "the most optimal", but realistically they offer much more depth of choice in what are trying to optimize.