From what I've heard the Meta about the Skills in question were set in stone by Beta Testers. Going off memory of the manga
From what I remember archery was considered useless they ran out of arrows and had low accuracy at low levels. Which from the perspective of an actual RPG enthusiast makes no sense to me.
yeah imagine being a beta
Tester and not testing out everything, its kinda impossible to imagine by todays standards let alone the future. look at PoE2 for a recent example that very much fits the theme of this, people testing out everything on day 1 and finding combos.
archery being bad because you have to buy arrows didnt make sense to me either because they were also willing to buy potions and just based of the manga the cost of both is inconsequential beyond the start of the game. running out was mentioned once before near the very beginning of the manga but mc found a way to "stack" them almost instantly too and we never actually get to see how the inventory system in this game works in the manga so who knows.
I think another Skill of his that's ostracized is Potion making but it's been a while. The problem there I think was just idiots not realizing that crafters can make potions way better then NPC vended potions.
yeah this one just makes no sense because early on it said the npc vendors had a limited stock of potions meaning you will need to find other sources, so i dont know how potion crafting would ever be labeled as bad.
Cooking was useless at the start because they apparently didn't have a Hunger system and food didn't give stat buffs. It was just a thing they could do just because until the first update.
Essentially every Skill that is hated was specifically hated because idiots who have no patience and just wanted to use the skills that are immediately useful instead of investing in long term skills were the vocal minority who defined the common players perception of the Meta
yeah mc only picked up cooking after the update that gave players a hunger bar. i dunno how people hate on the other skills though without even trying it, not like everyone plays meta in the first place meaning stuff like this shouldve been discovered pretty quick.
(i binged this whole manga when i made my original comment so its all fresh)