For me the bottom line is: Paladins are balanced by their need to have both Str (or Dex for the nutjobs out there) and Cha, thus splitting their focus. You are balancing your offense and support capabilities when picking up an ASI. A 1 level dip into Hexblade breaks that balance and turns Paladins from a really strong class into a broken class. A +5 to hit/damage and to all your (and your close friends) saving throws by level 9 is miles beyond what any other class can pull off at that stage in their adventures.
If it was just swords bards that were doing it, then whatever. It is a decent enough subclass, but it wouldn't push it into broken AF in the same way.
You're forgetting one: Constitution. They go down fast without it. Paladins are almost as MAD as monks are, but at least monks can use Dex for attacks and AC. And Paladins don't get enough spell slots to make smite a consistent damage dealer, and they don't get as many weapon attacks as fighters. Having a hexblade dip doesn't exactly break them, especially when rogues are outright busted with their two bonus action shoves.
...or you could start fixing the issue by making shove again a 5ft push on a skill challenge instead of an attack - not a 20ft autokill as a bonus action. Then roll back the crap of 2 bonus actions for rogue because you took exclusive abilities and passed them on to all classes.
I don't see how broken unbalanced mechanics are an argument to introduce more broken unbalanced mechanics instead of fixing the actual issues. But that's my main problem with Larian. To me their by far and wide biggest issue is their game balancing and encounter designs as a result. They didn't improve on 5e with their homebrew, but introduced an incredible amount of new problems by 'slightly tweaking' core fundamentals thus breaking all mechanics build up on the base foundation of the game's mechanics.
And no, paladins are not a weak or problematic class by any means. If you go with STR 16 and CHA while CON is 14 its still a viable build for a paladin up to level 12 since you can have heavy armor (and shields). If you go DX 14 and STR 10 so you can max out medium armor while pushing CHA to 18/20 and suddenly buff everyone around you with +4/5 on saves, while maxing out your attacks and spell DC just because you took 1 level of hexblade - that's bonkers.
Paladin's have up to fighter level 11 the same amount of attacks as fighters - and I doubt anyone claims fighters are overpowered.
