Well, the easy alternative was always giving the maxim actually decent stats as a heavy machine gun so it didn't need sustained fire at all
But this is what we got instead. And given that we have been given it, making it actually able to be used in a reasonable time frame is pretty important.
This wasn't designed as an alternative to the MG42's delete squad/light vehicle/fighting position button- it is meant to allow maxims to do the heavy machine gun job that every other MG gets to do simply by setting up and firing.
There is 2 types of coh2 players:
- the ones that say "do never significantly buff the maxim again"
- the ones who joined CoH2 after the maxim spam cancer abuse from 2015/16, hence they never saw it before