The One True broken as hell version, you mean.
I cannot argue with that, as evidenced by your example, and shenanigans that can lead to nearly invincible wizards in even Core Rules Only games. Nor can I argue that it tends to produce sensible characters, as evidenced by the fact that I'm building a 500 pound vampire whose preferred mode of locomotion is bouncing despite wearing hundreds of pounds of armor, and who careens from foe to foe like some sort of blood-draining pinball. Who is a psychic, and uses this power to become a 4000 pound vampire on occasion.
On the other hand, I've yet to encounter a system that's so well-suited to my preferred style of character building, which typically involves looking at what the system supports and drawing inspiration from that. Freeform systems don't suit me too well, because I have a tendency to face severe writer's block when trying to come up with a concept with no guidance, and I have a poor time deciding what's a reasonable quality or no, or what miscellaneous roleplaying decision for a use of my character's powers counts as an asspull*. It doesn't help that I tend to prefer playing Big Damn Hero-type characters, which makes "Does it make sense according to the known laws of physics" a really poor metric.
*As an example, I'd never have thought to have a character bathe in his own acid breath if I didn't know that I could have a character who could breathe acid, take a feat to make it persist, and be immune to acid, but it wound up being one of those little touches that contributed to the overall picture of a character that cares so little about other people's opinions that it bathes in what is literally its own vomit
I've never played an earlier edition, so I can't speak for that, but I can say that I find 4E to be too constrictive and simplistic, while the other systems I've tried are either too freeform for my tastes and (this is a purely opinion-based gripe) written in a pretentious tone I'm not a fan of (such as Unknown Armies), or too dense and difficult to navigate efficiently (GURPS).