It is the meta, but it is an easily countered meta. I’ve been in plenty of games where rushing docks fails.
Let enemy team rush docks, many send almost their entire team there anyway, divide your team primarily between workshop and hanger, with a few lone cappers for refinery and quarry, when the toll sounds for dock capture, the workshop and hangar teams reassemble and rush the path the throwers take to get to the keep before they turtle in. You will usually kill them even if your team is defeated in the process.
At this point enemy team has zero seiege whilst your team has demos up and runnin as well as tank and hangar support. From there on you keep a good chunk of the team harassing docks and glaives on the way out (literally hit and run them) whilst the other divides between taking out turrets and manning your own siege. I’ve seen this work several times.
Some people believe docks is key to the win they will neglect every single aspect of the game to try and keep docks, even if the glaives aren’t getting set up. They will react to this by sending MORE to docks rather than trying to pressure the other nodes the other team has dominance over- it’s absolutely nuts.
Demos plus tank plus hangar will easily destroy the gate before glaives do if you keep harassing the glaives. This health buff may well make them sturdier but even so, it doesn’t take many people hitting and running to get the glaives down, ideally ranged classes like Locks and SPriests whom can dot them up and run, and repeat as needed.
Glaives are good, but they’re not worth throwing everything else in a match over, especially if the opposing team uses the fact docks is a hotspot early to exploit and control the other nodes.
Also becuase glaives are very far back and outrange the turrets, they create an issue in the final breach when the door goes down. I had a game on my ally char where we won via reinforcements when horde took docks early where they got our gate down and then repeatedly failed to get their team through said gate because nobody had taken the time to kill our turrets and the distance from the gate to the glaives was great enought it allowed us adequate time to turtle at the gate and blockade it, and they simply couldn’t get through.
Maybe if they had tried hanger as well, or workshop, they could have got the means to break the turtle, but they never bothered to contest them and our team responded too quickly to the gate falling. I would have loved to have read their BG chat that game, they went from a 50 reinforcement lead with our gate down to losing the match with us 80 reinforcements up.