Blue
Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal
And what is the final final final word? Attaining balance in a game like D&D is impossible because in the context of a game like D&D, balance is subjective.
What I mean by that, is that what is considered good balance varies from person to person, and playstyle to playstyle. Some people want every PC to be mechanically balanced every round of combat. Some want every encounter to be balanced. All the way up to people who actually want large variations from encounter to encounter (niche protection), where if balance happens over the course of a campaign, then it's a balanced game. Think of like in AD&D where magic users were weak until higher levels, then became the more powerful. Over the course of the campaign, it balanced out. Therefore, it's possible to have two preferences that conflict with each other. If you have PCs balanced every round or encounter, it's impossible to also achieve niche protection.
Can we agree on this?
Therefore, it is my final final final ruling that any thread that laments or tries to fix balance in D&D as an objective truth is inherently incorrect. Every one of those threads are only applicable to the person's personal tastes, and thus the game is not necessarily inherently imbalanced by default. The designer's considerations of what the scope was and what the game wanted to achieve should always be taken into account. And as we all know, my opinion matters more than anyone else's
To me, this feels like arguments against climate change. "Well, some scientists say yes, and some scientists say no, so there is no truth."
When really, well over 95% of climate scientists have some strong level of agreement that it's happening and the gross symptoms and causes, even if they may vary in what particulars they have studied.
Same for balance. It's pretty easy to get a consensus on gross violations of game balance. "Hey, let's let sorcerers have an unlimited number of spell slots of any spell level" can be seen to be unbalanced against the other classes, and except for that one guy (because there's always that one guy) who argues that it's fine, everyone can agree.
So yes, perfect balance is entirely table dependent and there isn't a universal truth, but that doesn't invalidate that as you move farther from that fluzzy point, you can get more and more consensus and have a working metric of balance pretty easily.
In other words, I agree with your point that there is no "objective point of balance" that fits everyone, but that trying to apply that to all discussions of relative balance is reductio ad absurdum. The majority of cases there can be a clear consensus if something is more or less balanced against other points.