It's still terrible design that's so deeply rooted in hearthstone's mechanics that it's borderline impossible to fix.

Lets say i play a Leper Gnome on turn one and my opponent does nothing. Next turn we both play a Knife Juggler and trade. Next turn we both play the same minion and trade, and so on.

So ultimately this Leper Gnome deals like 10 dmg until he gets removed by AoE or a minion spawned by a deathratte. The point is that early minions snowball way too hard and reactive play has next to no payoff. Knife Juggler is better than Dark Bomb because the Knife Juggler has the potential for ridiculous damage if he's left on the board while the Dark Bomb will always trade 1:1 and is unplayable on turn 2 if your opponent has no minion.

So reactive play <<<<< proactive play

The same what i said about reactive vs proactive play applies to combos vs minions that are good on their own (Shredder, Boom, etc). In vanilla hs, if you played auchenai+circle vs zoo, you instantly won the game. Now you'll kill a Nerubian Egg, a Haunted Creeper and a Shredder and the board won't change at all. Same for cards like Hobgoblin. It requires you to completely build your deck around it, sucks on its own, and if combo'd in the perfect situation - which requires you to have certain cards in your hand-, it's only marginally better than cards that are always good.

So the way to come back vs proactive aggro decks is to AoE, heal, make combos, or drop big threats that trade with multiple cards. If you repeatedly trade up, you cardstarve your opponent and win. And that worked until people realized that they can play decks with the best of two worlds - tempo decks - and beat aggro and control decks. If you just play one card per turn on curve, you won't nearly run out of cards as fast as aggro decks.

And that's why 90% of the decks we see today are proactive tempo decks that only include reactive cards if they're borderline overpowered. And it's a shitty way to play the game because it leaves no room for synergies, combos, comebacks or any meaningful decisions.

With the last two expansion, Blizzard seems to have realized this, but they apparently think that the best way to make people play cards that are weak on their own, but great when combo'd, is to release ridiculously overpowered cards with forced synergies like MC or Everyfin is Awesome