An opinion you're probably all alone with?

[warty goblin]

Speaking of balance: here is another hot take:

Balance is a terrible optimization goal for a single player game.

I completely agree with this, with the provisio that a player doing sane things on Normal difficulty should be able to succeed. So like in an RPG if you play Sir Swordsalot and pump up your Strength and take sword related upgrades, you should be able to beat the game with a reasonable amount of effort. If you do obviously stupid things like play a wizard, but pump dexterity, ignore spells and charge everything and try to punch it to death, it's OK if you get totally atomized. It's also fine if there's builds that completely trivialize the game, so long as on standard difficulty you can just muddle through without graphing out every level up choice and item for an entire playthrough.

Further hot takes, RTS games died in no small part because they listened to the community, which naturally was made up of highly invested, competitive multiplayer loving people. These people make up like 90% of the vocal community, and are probably like 10% of actual players. Everybody else just wants a fun campaign, a skirmish against a predictable AI that provides a steady stream of dudes to murder, and lots of cool, goofy units to mess with. Yes floating the resources for a super expensive mega-dragon is dumb and less efficient than building like 500 archers. It's also way, way cooler, and playing around with cool stuff is the fun of an RTS.

The trick is that for the singleplayer person, balance is a negative once you clear the threshold of being able to win with a particular Faction and sane strategy. Part that point, balance is just removing cool stuff.