But if we look at reality, guns really are drastically less reliable in inflicting injury on a target. Even in modern times you can find that people have been shot in the head and walked away on their own, no permanent injury even without medical assistance, while someone got shot in a toe and died in less than a minute(real cases, they are absurd outliers, yet still cases like them keep popping up).

The primary advantage of guns is that they're laughably easy to use, they can be industrially massproduced and their ammo likewise.

The disadvantage is that unless a bullet hits something "valuable", or the hydrostatic shock of the bullet does, and "something valuable" entails much less of a human body than you would expect, then you can get hit literally a dozen times without it affecting your ability to run up to the shooter and pound him into paste. This is even more blatant nowadays since it became modern to switch to small caliber high velocity ammunition for many militaries, a change that has been debated hotly for decades by now and wont go away until SCHV goes away, which it wont, as the lower recoil and lighter weights are considered too valuable, even when it means the bullets are ineffective.

If we instead look at earlier firearms, it becomes even more obvious, as there's any number of accounts from 17th century pirates up to American civil war where people get hit by bullets and keep on fighting unperturbed, sometimes not even noticing they were injured. My own nation's success in warfare in the 17th and 18th century clearly shows the same, as their standard method of fighting was to simply IGNORE the enemy firing at them while steadily marching forward, then at preferably less than 30m, fire a massed volley, 1 or 2 lines all at once, and then CHARGE. Because even the massed volley at close range usually didn't do all that much damage with the bullets(just as the ignored scattered fire from the enemy while advancing to that point rarely did much), but the effect of so many muskets firing at you from pointblank range, literally in your face, was like a very effective barrage of stungrenades, allowing a determined charge instantly afterwards to win even against massive odds, as the defenders were too dazzled to defend themselves properly.

So, guns are both "worthless" and very much not. Highly situational. Even a single random bullet can be deadly, yet at the same time even a dozen aimed shots can utterly fail to seriously injure a target. Melee weapons have a far more reliable average of damage caused. If guns were as much better than anything else as is often portrayed, there would never have been anything like the Japanese "competition" in China in the 30s of who could get the most kills with a sword during the battles, because they would all have died. Yet they didn't because they were skilled soldiers while their opposition was mostly not and they already had tactics for how to get into melee range against rifle infantry. Likewise you can find a few other examples, like the British officer that repeatedly used a bow during WWII, and very successfully so, another that used a sword, quite successfully until randomly killed for nothing that related to what weapon he used.

DW75