In a sense, yes.
DR’s on CC make securing a kill very difficult. Especially with dodging in root, stamina recovery, light roll, shirking energy, nodes that recover stamina, entomb and rapier all make it difficult unless it’s vs another bruiser.
Most people that don’t spam dodge escape with 3k or less health. That’s when the ranged users should capitalize.
Ranged players definitely capture on this plenty often as they have the most kills in OPR 3v3’s and wars.
Melee players usually have the least kills and are middle of the pack in damage.
Healers, and support IG/VG’s and tanks are the only ones doing less damage.
A lot of backline dps is considered trash damage due to, as you said, the game mechanics with healers as burst kills, but at the same time, I frames and many other factors contribute to people barely living constantly or flat out just sustaining all of a ranged person’s damage. DPS and melee burst tied together is the actual killer, not melee alone.
Light melee is a completely different story. High Risk, high reward and skill is required to be an effective light armor melee.
IG helps against Sacred ground and CC’s to help with escapee’s.
VG helps with rends and weakens along with buff removals.
Bow gives constant damage and can pick off low health escapee’s while giving constant damage to help counter AoE HoTs.
FS is the real killer. After watching dozens of vods from my company and watching wiily stream high competitive wars, fire staff is the number one smasher coupled with ice spike and pylon’s DPS.
Melee does good burst, but a good gravity well and a maelstrom chain combo might deal 4k-5k damage to me meanwhile one fireball does 2.5k or so even when I’m 20% fire res.
Ice gauntlet stops me from mass healing all the melee in the clump with ice storm and VG rending me makes me killable coupled with fireball bombs chunking me down slowly while IG/Melee DPS the HoTs making healing me very hard.
Most of my deaths in wars are caused by IG ice storm and a well timed fireball along with ice spikes and nasty pylons.
The melee damage is support damage against HoTs and clump potential with Gravity Well.
Metas change and it’s all different on a per server basis but this is my deduction.