5e built itself around a simple core.Things that might look like "oh, hey, that's for the powergamers," like SS/CBE, are like, yeah, but you're optimizing the low end towards the middle.
But no, I can't quite defend it logically, but my feeling is definitely that 5e didn't intentionally build in rewards for system mastery like Ivory Tower Roleplaying implied 3e did...
The issue was the core wasn't very balanced.
And they made all the complex rules except for spells variant rules. Then proceeded to not balance them.
The variant rules they should have known people would use weren't balanced at all. Feats. Multiclassing. Magic Items. Epic Boons. etc.