There have definitely, definitelyyyy been people who argued not to nerf characters and buff them for balancing. A pretty infamous one right here from the forum lol. But either way, they did exactly what you described, they nerfed some of any character, and buffed them more than the nerfs. They just chose to remove all their weaknesses with the buffs and make a bunch of Uber + frames, 50/50s on steroids, and ridiculously abusable strings. This patch is a masterclass why it shouldn't be done.
Speaking of which, here is Knee, playing against one of the best players in the world, now beating him by using the same 322 string over and over and over again because why use the other 100+ moves. There's a ton of videos like this from pro players matches across multiple countries the last couple of days, and it almost feels like they're trying to make a statement.
The failure of this patch cannot be overstated. I'll compare to MK for you since you might be less familiar. Imagine we are back when MK1 was in it's launch version, and people wanted more kameo balance, more character expression, and more power from their characters. Now, Ed Boon goes on live himself on a Kombat Kast saying how he listened and will drop a giant patch this season coming in weeks to address these exact things. Then the huge patch comes, and now literally all the kameos have a Cyrax Chopper move that only uses 1/4 of the kameo bar, Johnny and Kenshi get massively buffed, and most of the cast gets multiple + on block jailing no gap strings. That's the equivalent of what this patch was, no hyperbole. It might actually be the worst non-bug breaking type of patch I have ever seen in my long FG history. I couldn't even attempt to explain to you how this could even have happened.
