Surely, a middle ground can be found somewhere.
The key issue is abilities which require checks and tend to have very limited impacts, vs. spells which don't require checks, and tend to have extremely broad impacts.
This is a peculiarity of D&D's early design and Vancian heritage (if Vance hadn't been such an influence, D&D would likely have a much smaller difference between spellcasters and non-spellcasters, and a much better magic system). In Vance, you have these bizarre mental construct spells which you sort of hold and then nearly-instantly unleash. It's almost more sci-fi than magical, like it feels more Star Trek than Lord of the Rings.
Unfortunately D&D inherited that. In virtually all other fantasy fiction involving spells, two things are true:
1) Spells can fail and you can mess them up. This is sorta-true in actual Vancian magic but D&D didn't incorporate that.
2) Spells that do a lot take a very long time to cast and often require ritual magic with multiple casters.
D&D did introduce saving throws, which don't seem to mean the caster messed up, just that the target somehow resisted or dodged them (which happens a bit in Vance's work).
So the core thing that's messed-up here is that
casters can't fail outside of combat, essentially.
That combines with
spells having very major effects and being near-instant, to create a situation where, outside of combat, spells are needlessly more effective than non-spell-based abilities. It doesn't really make sense, fictionally. It should absolutely be possible to mess up casting or setting up a spell. In virtually all fantasy fiction involving spells (again, including Vance), that is a thing. But in D&D it's excluded as a possibility. Unless the target has a saving throw, your spell will never fail, never go wrong.
One way to balance things would be to give non-casting PCs more stuff that didn't fail, that didn't require a roll, that just required time/effort. 3E kind of did this a bit thanks to take 10 and take 20, but 5E abandoning them means those aren't an option. Tasha's/1D&D sticks a toe in the water by giving stuff like Climb Speeds, which are like, from a realism perspective, utterly wild (really, I can climb a 60ft cliff freehand in 6 seconds? Apparently!), but it's only a toe.
I don't think anyone's asking for martial fireballs and martial teleports.
I mean, combat isn't the major issue. It is an issue, but it's not the major one. 5E is kind of willing to give martials some fairly wild abilities in combat, and there's not a major balance issue there. It would be nice to see a bit more, but the Ranger problem is weird-ass backsliding. There's no reason Hunter's Mark and Conjure Barrage should be spells, as it were. Those could perfectly well be abilities (indeed, pretty sure the Conjure Barrage-equivalent used to be an ability and Hunter's Mark makes no more/less sense as Martial than literally dozens of Martial bonus-damage abilities), but for whatever bonkers reasons, WotC decided to go the opposite way to for example, giving Rangers a Climb Speed, and made them into actual spells.
