I am at work so I may not be able to gather all of my thoughts, and am on mobile so I don't know how to format this post into something pretty looking. I just wanted to open this up for discussion with a devil's advocate take on it.
PUBG just released their Dev Letter about the "rebalance" (nerf) of most DMRs. Being involved in both the competitive and casual playerbases. Funny enough I hear the same responses: "This will kill DMRs!", "Guess we are running double AR now!" "This is the final (final) (final) (final) nail in the coffin!.", among many other takes. It's fine to have an immediate knee-jerk reaction to this, it takes away from a lot of people's time they put into mastering their long DMR usage. Now let's try to get into the logic behind it.
This first part will be regarding the firing rate change, I haven't looked over the new damage stats to understand them so I will keep that point mute. Most ranged engagements in PUBG take place between 150-300m which is obviously a primarily DMR range, and it is what DMR's intended use are. This nerf, in my opinion, does not negatively impact these engagements enough to create a huge gap where you feel useless now. Every single gun needs to have their place in the game. CQC, Mid-range and Long-range, they have essentially cemented DMRs into the mid and long range category, which is objectively the point of them. What this nerf does do is completely remove this unintentional DMR-AR usage ( https://streamable.com/vyh80j ). DMR "spamming" as a concept should have never existed in this game, most of the DMR's firing cap (the rate at which they can be fired rapidly) is so high that you can practically shoot a DMR so fast that it is essentially an automatic weapon.
DMR dominance has been the meta for the past..7 years (DMRs weren't originally dominant). For a multiplayer game there needs to be balance as the game progresses, it will NEVER be balanced enough. The current meta of running AR / DMR in competitive and players having so much impact with one type of weapon is very boring, despite the skill it takes to have THAT amount of impact. You cannot forget this is live-service game, so things cannot just be the same for years and years despite them already having been.
All PUBG wants to do, whether they used player feedback or not, is just slightly shift into watching the majority of better players use something other than AUG / Beryl and MK12 / MINI to a "different strokes for different folks" meta. Sniper Rifles right now do not have that impact that DMRs do even if they are supposed to, this change makes sure that you CAN potentially see more usage out of bolts and unconventional rifles (Dragunov, M16, Mutant). If your only reason for playing a game is one specific part of the game and not the game itself, I think you never liked it to begin with. Also with any change in anything ever, people just like to complain about anything and everything. If you look over to other Battle Royales or even other Live Service games and see their metas, weapons get balanced / nerfed / flat-out deleted all the time. It is part of a long-term project, things change.
TL:DR DMR nerfs are good and it's part of the game. DMRs usage right now is not what they are intended for.
Edit: I respect the not reading the wall, just tell me what you think of the nerf. I think it's good, the meta is stale. I want to not just pass up guns because they are not the most impactful.