Not in my experience. I've played plenty and DMed more and I've never been 'demanded' to min/max anything. Games don't demand anything, and if 3e encourages one thing, it's customization, which may or may not lead to a particularly powerful character as a result.
This is the cycle that happened both in my game and in the entire campaign of Living Greyhawk as a whole:
1) Everyone just learns to play the game. Everyone is single classed and takes feats out of the PHB. People are seen taking some of the "substandard" feats because they sound good and people say, "It works for my character concept".
2) Then someone shows up to the table with a character that takes only the good feats. Their first attack they say "I hit for X damage" and everyone at the table stops and stares and says "How did you do that much damage, did you crit or something?" and the player explains that no, they just took this feat which gives a bonus to damage and they were using this class feature and this magic item. Everyone at the table says "Wow...that's awesome. I didn't know you could do that."
3) The next session, one of the other players has shown up with a virtual copy of the first character and asked to retire his old character and play this instead. Though, he announces all proudly that he has one upped the original character by taking a feat that the first person didn't think of.
4) The DM starts getting a little frustrated. The average damage of the party has gone up fairly dramatically with these new characters in the group. Monsters are dying a round or two earlier every combat now. Battles that used to leave the group battered and bruised are now not causing any damage at all. It doesn't feel nearly as satisfying to run combats when the party isn't afraid of them at all. It feels pointless spending 30 minutes to an hour running a battle where the PCs take no damage at all. So, he decides to increase the average CR of the enemies he uses by 1. Everything starts to feel better after that.
5) A new book comes out and the players eagerly buy it and read through it looking for cool options for their character. There is a large discussion about how this new feat looks super awesome and it would compliment their character WAY more than what they have now and the DM is begged to allow people to switch feats out for the new ones. The average damage of the party goes up again.
6) Someone notices a new concept entirely that they didn't think of in the new book and decides to bring in that as a character. Sometimes without even meaning to they end up being even more powerful than the existing characters.
7) There are a couple of people left who decided not to change their characters at all. They start getting rather frustrated because they are doing 4 damage a round while other people are doing 30. They start to feel like their character is worthless and might as well not contribute at all. They start tuning out during battles because they don't care about them anymore. Eventually they do one of three things: They complain to the DM that they aren't having any fun because everyone else is overpowered, they quit the game, or the give up and come back with an overpowered character of their own. The DM may decide to ban something if he is told about it. If he does, everyone switches to the second most powerful option instead of the first.
8) Pretty much repeat steps 2 through 7 for each new book that comes out
