>>66724
The reason why Dendro was completely dominant when it released was because it was the first element to actually be competently designed.
The pre-dendro meta was almost exclusively vape, melt and freeze because Vape and Melt were the only reactions that were actually inherently useful, and Freeze was only viable because of Cryo Resonance and 4p Blizzard giving a ton of free crit. Anemo's only purpose was to buff Cryo and Pyro, Hydro's only purpose was to enable these 2 reactions and Geo and Electro were legitimately completely dead in the water.
You may not like how dendro centric it was back then but 3.X was genuinely extremely healthy for the meta, even if Burning is dogshit. It single handedly saved every single Electro character except Razor from the graveyard, resuscitated EC by evolving on it with HB, and allowed Anemos to actually deal damage thanks to Faru.
Yeah, Cryo did die because of it and Geo remained dead until Navia, but having 6 viable team archetypes is better than 3.