Limits progression by the simple fact that all per day, all per encounter, etc abilitiy becomes the "same", on 3.5e, a fireball and a maximized empowered fireball costs different resources for eg.
About homogenization, 5e made the bloodline of the sorcerer much more important. And the caster classes are not the same on casting spells. Warlocks has the best cantrips and ability to regain spells via short rest and unique invokations, can melee with pact of the blade. Wizards are the most versatile, able to shift spells as longs they have money and scrolls to scribe their spells and sorcerers can "empower" his bloodline, draconic sorcerers can gain wings, can empower a spell of his elemental ancestry with increased damage
4e is another game ruined by the """ballance cult""", a believe that a sorcerer of silver draconic ancestry who knows only cold spells should be good as a paladin who dedicated his life on hunting undead in a heavily undead campaign. And despite you saying that melee warriors are weak, fighter is almost two times more used than sorcerer (
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/is-your-dd-character-rare/ ) and
for humans, fighters are 4 times more used than sorcerers.According to the reddit, here is the classes in raw damage from attacks/cantrips.
![[Linked Image]](https://i.imgur.com/ph9VnUx.png)
source
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/do9o6c/oc_dps_over_time_of_all_classes_using_only_melee/As for power creep, you criticized the massive """imbalance""" at high levels and now say that high level is rarely played. For online groups yes, but most D&D adaptations to video game has high level gameplay, except Toee(level cap = 10 but Co8 removes the level cap ,and the first baldur's gate) and descent to avernus goes up to lv 13, descent to avernus will probably inspire BG3 a lot.
PS : Other amazing thing that 5e did is to make magical items less broken powerful. IMO RPG's shold not focus that much on gear.
