D&D's 5.5 edition for the most part empowered player characters, but also made tougher monsters (and tougher combat encounter balancing,) to the point where I'm not actually sure if the game is "easier" or "harder" than it was.
But I think one archetype that truly got a nerf was ranged weapon users. In 5.0, Great Weapon Master and Sharpshooter were basically the equivalents of one another for melee and ranged builds, respectively. Each allowed you to, on each attack, choose to take a -5 penalty to your attack rolls in order to get a +10 bonus to your damage. In the vast majority of cases, this wound up giving you more damage on average, and I'd argue was even more appealing to Rangers and Fighters that picked up the Archery fighting style, as you'd already have a higher-than-usual chance to hit anyway.
Now, I don't think you can't build a ranged-weapon-focused character with 5.5 rules, but it requires taking some odd paths. Weirdly, Great Weapon Master actually works pretty well if you use a Longbow or Heavy Crossbow, which are the only two ranged weapons with the Heavy property. (It feels frustrating that Muskets don't have this,) but the feat is awkward because it buffs Strength, a stat you're not going to be worried much about if you are focusing on ranged weapons, and its Hew feature won't work with ranged attacks.
Generally, when I go into this math-heavy theory-crafting, I tend to assume that we don't have any magic items, unless it's about an Artificer (whose easy access to magic items is a class feature - which is honestly a bit tricky as a bit of design because the class becomes far more powerful the stingier a DM is with magic items).
But realistically, most campaigns I play in have plenty of magic items, and it's basically an assumption that by level 5 or 6, you should at least have a +1 weapon.
+X weapons do flatten out the difference between weapon types a bit - if you have +4 to Strength and are comparing a Longbow and a Glaive, you're looking at 1d8+4 versus 1d10+4, which is 8.5 average versus 9.5 average, or a difference of about 12%. But if you have +3 versions of those weapons, it's now 11.5 versus 12.5, which is a difference of about 9%.
Ranged weapons tend to have lower damage dice than melee weapons, but that difference becomes less meaningful the more flat damage you add to both.
The thing is, ranged weapon users actually can, potentially, double-dip with these +X bonuses, because not only can you get a +3 Longbow, you can also fire +3 Arrows with that bow, which means that overall, you're getting a +6 bonus to both attack and damage rolls.
And I think that starts to make a pretty significant difference, especially because it's affecting both attacks and damage.
If we took some character with no class features other than martial weapon proficiency and had them make attacks against the Tarrasque (an AC of 25,) someone using a +3 Greatsword who had a +5 to Strength and +6 PB would be hitting on a roll of 11 or higher, and so they'd hit 50% of the time, with a 5% chance to do an extra 2d6 with a crit. So, the normal damage of 2d6+8 (or 15) gets cut in half to 7.5, and then we add in that 5% of doing 7 more to give us an extra .35, so it's doing 7.85.
Our ranged character with a +3 Longbow and +3 Arrows is going to hit for 1d8+11, or 15.5 on average, but they're also getting a +17 to hit, so they only need to roll an 8 or higher, meaning a 65% hit chance. So, 15.5x65% is 9.75, with a 5% chance to get an extra 4.5, so toss in .225, meaning they do an average of 9.975.
Obviously, this is a bit of a vacuum. Maybe our melee person has Great Weapon Master, which adds 6 damage to each of their hits. So, that means the average goes up by 3, giving them 10.85 average damage. They're now on top.
But if our ranged character has the Archery fighting style, they now actually have a +19 to hit, so they only need to roll a 6 or higher, meaning an additional 10% of that hit damage to their average, bringing them up to 10.95, meaning they're now on top, if only by a little bit.
The rub, here, though, is that magical ammunition is not something I see a lot of DMs giving out, and I think there's a good reason for that: players are often very hesitant to use consumable magic items. It's a classic problem: if something isn't easy to replenish, players won't want to use it, saving it for when its impact is going to be biggest, but that can also lead them to actually forget they have it when they're, say, fighting the Tarrasque.
There isn't an item like "+X Quiver of Infinite Arrows," which would just allow you to count on always having such ammo available to you - though maybe there should be.
I think it's actually ideal for ranged characters to be somewhat less powerful than melee characters simply because you're not taking as big of a risk if you can fight from 120 feet away. I think the design problem in D&D with that, though, is that in a game where most classes are spellcasters, there's none of that downside if you're 120 feet away and tossing fireballs and hypnotic patterns.
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