Path of "Meaningful combat"

Hi GGG, when you've talked about meaningful combat in PoE2 I was exited and I still am exited to see where your vision leads PoE2 or if it just becomes PoE1 in a more modern skin. There are a few thoughts that I want to share with you. Please keep in mind that this is just my humble opinion as one player that wants to see PoE2 succeed because I love the game and I think you're vision could bring us an exceptional game.

There is no meaningful combat against trash mobs!
The core mechanic of an ARPG (and most RPGs in general) is the cycle of getting better/stronger to face harder challenges. If I don't feel like I'm getting stronger, there is no game. If everything is stupidly hard and deadly, there is no meaning. It doesn't make sense that I'm slaying gods but struggle against some random skeletons. Feeling powerful against trash mobs (white/normal) instead gives context/meaning to the hard encounters. I become god, wiping out hordes of normal enemies at once but there are some stronger and a few even dangerous enemies that still dare to challenge me.
This is different at the start of the campaign where you're weak and white mobs should pose a threat but that needs to change while you progress.

There is no meaningful combat against 5 rares!
If rares should be dangerous meaningful combat encounters you can't have multiple of them. If one rare has mechanics that you need to see and react to, stacking multiple of them on top of each other just creates a mess. When there are encounters with e.g. 5 rares at once, you're either guaranteed dead or the fight against any one of them individually is not challenging or meaningful, which makes them essentially glorified trash mobs with a little more HP and better loot.
There can be interesting encounters with multiple rares at once if they are not fully random but meant to be fought together. E.g. a pair of rare bandits where one is a close range tank with mods that slow, weaken you and one ranged that has damage mods, knock back, volatiles etc. But those two would be one rare encounter that shouldn't overlap with other rare encounters.

Visuals of the monsters should match their danger/rank and skills!
If I encounter a big enemy multiple times my size, that shouldn't be of normal rarity. It looks big and dangerous and it should be. On the other hand, small normal looking enemies (bugs, skeletons, ...) shouldn't be unkillable rares that try to hunt me down.
Enemies should have an identity that also dictates what monster mods they can roll. It makes sense, that spiders have mods related to poison, chaos, slow, maybe rare spiders can summon a swarm of lower tier spiders but I wouldn't expect a regular spider to have an exploding fiery magma barrier or magma balls chasing you. There might be a fire spider rare that looks fiery, red, glowing that has access to these mods and does fire damage and ignites instead of phys, chaos and poison.
Meaningful combat imo requires visual clues and clarity. I need to have some idea what I'm facing to be able to react to it and I think that this is only possible with curated pools of monster mods that fit the archetype of the monster to avoid the stupid outcomes of random.

If there are 15 rares + the ones from league mechanics in a map, they are not rare!
If the fight against a rare should be meaningful and thereby takes time, the current amount of them per map is absurd. There should be a lot of normals, with fewer (let's say 20% of all mobs) magic monsters mixed in and a handful of rares and max 1-2 unique encounters like bosses or rogue exiles. League mechanics add more monsters to a map and it might make sense for them to have a different ratio of the different tiers of monsters but this is something we as players can control if we want to interact with them. Base maps should have reasonable ratios.

How skills should interact with monsters!
I'd love to see you be more outspoken about the purpose you've designed a skill or support for and match the numbers. A clear skill should be tagged with clear and should be great at clearing hordes of white mobs given the proposed support gems. To achieve that it needs good speed, great AoE, low cost and low damage. But most importantly it shouldn't have too much visual effect/clutter because you expect this skill to be all over the screen all the time.
To kill a pack of magic monster you might still want to use a clear skill but should be expected to take more attacks or add in supports that increase damage but reduce one or more of the other axis (AoE, speed, cost). Alternatively you could use a simple combo. A combo for clearing magic monsters still needs to be quite fast but I'd expect a medium AoE and medium total cost.
When it comes to rares and uniques there should be dps skills, labeled as such, with big damage but only against single targets. If they are too slow, you can't use them in combat, so I would expect them to either have cooldown or require a longer combo to setup them up.
And of course there is player freedom to modify skills with support gems to make them better for clear or against bosses or to better fit a specific play style but a new player should be able to look at a gem and see what it was meant to be used for.
To make it work, the numbers need to make sense. A rare monster needs to be a lot more tanky than a normal one (life, es, defenses, recovery) and a dps skill or combo needs to be way more efficient than a clear skill at dealing with them.
Crank the numbers up. Why shouldn't a skill+supports meant for clear have 30x AoE but 100x less damage than your boss combo. The bigger the numbers the easier it is to differentiate between different skills/combos for different purposes, making us use more different skills, weapon sets, combos, ...