Whedon and the Russos totally fucked up. But …
Even if MCU!Nat isn’t a serum-freak, her abilities are not reducible to shooting things. To jump tracks momentarily to The Expanse, she’s not the marine (Bobby), she’s the spy (Cotyar). She isn’t what pilots carry to kill things. When you’re busy worrying about what she adds to a frontal assault of superpowered individuals who can’t even get the job done—comparing dicks, as it were—you’ve missed the whole point of Widow’s skill set, and you’ve failed to understand her character (even to the extent that Whedon and the Russos have drowned it under layers of misogyny).
She knows this about herself. Frankly, I think Mjolnir might have surprised her, but she’s not competing with the boys to see who can lift it, who is “virtuous” in the ways they think Thor must be. (That kind of vir is the opposite of worthy, which was the whole point of Thor.) When it comes down to Black Widow as the only hitter you’ve got left, you still aren’t actually screwed, but the situation isn’t going to be salvageable in those terms.
Nor is she reducible to being the supposedly sensible mom-friend. Hawkeye is the sensible mom-friend of the MCU, in a stunning reversal of his comics incarnations. Nat isn’t grounded; she’s disillusioned. She isn’t wise in that distanced common-sense fashion, which knows what healthy looks like and that this isn’t even close; she’s jaded from her experience, but knows how to use the intel it’s given her, and how to get more at any time, from any source.
But Nat also knows, from experience, that she isn’t and wasn’t healthy, and she knows that there is such a thing, and where to go to get patched up in multiple sense of the term. And she knows when you aren’t, not because she knows health, but because she knows how to read people and use their character builds against them for a range of objectives. And it’s still a weird use, to her, of her skill set, but we’ve seen her arc involve using her powers for good—and understanding what “good” means, as opposed to the other side of a conflict from the “bad guys"—not just to add red to her ledger. Which is why it hurts all the more when she loves Bruce but needs to use the Hulk, and knows the harm she’s doing when she kicks him off the cliff.
(Though I’m not convinced that their love of one another as people who hate themselves would have been healthy for them in any way, as composed in Whedon’s terms. And in Ragnarok, I think Bruce’s ability to throw himself off the cliff, so to speak, is growth. But it reinforces the Hulk’s realization, at the end of Age of Ultron, that nobody loves Hulk. People who love other people, including Banner on both sides now, just use Hulk. What we missed from MCU!Sakaar was people loving Hulk and Hulk loving people in genuine interpersonal ways. Hulk as hero in a story where Banner never shows up.)
Black Widow is a strategist, a tactician, and some combination of the two as a field agent. If Rhodey is the master of military tactics and strategy, and the one who should be planning the use of their hitters even as he is also one of them, Nat is the master of the intelligence side of the equation. She bests every hitter she comes across, but never by being one of them. And she was left that position, having been trained for it by Fury. Maria Hill is Fury’s protege on the organizational side of things, she has been trained to run the show, but she’s not the spy.
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