Pre-EoC wilderness was flourishing in terms of population, certainly compared to today's standards and even OSRS's standards.

'Over-powered unique weapons.' What spec weapons could do back then pales in comparison to basically any threshold ability today, especially with the abysmal hit chances we had back then. The advantage of having AGS/Dclaws over cheaper alternatives like Dds was fairly slight at best and certainly nowhere near the amount of advantage the extra accuracy and damage T90s give over T80s today, if you're implying people who had expensive weapons had too much of an advantage. Especially when having an expensive spec weapon meant you couldn't have an expensive main weapon unless you were looking to lose your entire bank in about a day in the wilderness.

'Defence not being influential', Pre eoc rune armour had over 70%+ block chance against the best melee/range weapons because of its sheer defensive bonuses (full rune slash defence ~250, godsword slash bonus 132). Now even T90 tank armour you only get about 50-60% block chance against T90 weapons of the style the armour is strong against. People were literally forced to make pures just to be able to KO each other at lower levels and the combat system was sufficiently slow paced for unspoken rules like 'no prot prayers' and 'no safing' to be the standard, and we didn't even have healing items like portents back then and barely anyone made use of OP healing items like pnecks/gorajian mushrooms except by pures during the occasional clan warring.

'Lack of diversity': Pre EoC people could bring dozens of different viable main weapon/spec weapon combinations and armour variation was also much higher. now it's just T90 weapon+whatever the highest level armour is you're willing to lose.

Range/Mage could have been better but the game was already moving in that direction with introduction of weapons like Polypore and this isn't an argument because buffing range/mage simply required tweaking a few numbers at most and filling the necessary gaps like OSRS is doing, not change the whole combat system.