You realise that four machine guns is a greater number than one, right? What exactly does the M16 have to do with this argument? And what does the M16 being the best AA unit in CoH2 have to do with real life machine gun performance?
Americans cared so little for your primitive water-cooling that even though they were slapping together 4 machine guns on a whole truck with a complicated electrical mount, they didn't care enough to run a single coolant line on the already existing radiator.
I've now had my fill of your trolling.
Back to the original point:
Fixing crew weapons requires one thing, and one thing only: mortars need to do serious amounts of AOE damage to blobs. They need to be the early game equivalent of rocket artillery.
This requires a faster shell speed to respond to blobs, and a much greater AOE to punish blobs while not doing a serious amount of damage to a single squad.
MGs are not the counter to blobs. Not in real-life, nor in game. MGs are an effective defensive weapon, but can easily be overcome by mass assaults, or abused sightlines.
The proper counter to blobbing ought to be AOE indirect fire as it is in real life. We can see this in rocket artillery, however, for some reason at the smaller scale people think mortars should serve no purpose other than a waste of manpower that can occasionally clear out a house.
Without an early game counter to blobbing build orders will never change much beyond 4x infantry and maybe an MG. Why would they? MGs and mortars are slow, finicky, and can't capture as much territory as an infantry squad.