So basically anyone with a dot or multiple instances of small amounts of damage nullifies refraction, which in turn greatly decreases her survive ability. Seems about right. SO basically dont bother with her unless the enemy team has little to do dot capability. Slowly learning who to pick to counter certain heroes.
At a pub level a great TA player will still wreck a shitty counter, and TA is a very snowballish hero so if you get a good start somehow, you can rape the rest of the game single handedly. But yeah she has counters, back when TA was considered first pick, Dark Seer was the most common counter used, but it's not a 100% matchup. Bat was also used when he wasn't banned, but again not a 100% counter. Venomancer and Jakiro solo mid were also used and it kinda worked sometimes, depended a lot on the TA player though.
However if the enemy team has any of these going mid AND treant to put living armor on them, there is basically 0 chances to win the lane as TA with the bottle crow nerf. That's because TA can generally still manage to beat people who drop her refraction by abusing her deceptively long range and superior damage to chip at people and possibly dive them to finish them. All of this is pointless against Living Armor and she can't even remove the charges quickly so you basically do 0dmg for 5hits in a row and it heals up any sort of preparation harass, so yeah.
There's a ton of heroes that were very good and still are but aren't played competitively anymore though. Earlier we were talking about Riki. Funny enough Riki was considered a top tier counter pick back when AM/Morph/QoP were all the rage. This time is kinda coming back with a ton of AM/Qop picks(morph not so much), so at some point it wouldn't be unlikely to see Riki come back to the scene to wreck some people. He does poorly vs Naix though and not so good against Gyro/PL so makes sense he disapeared for a while. Another hero that used to be everywhere and you rarely see anymore, Panda Brewmaster(which was also a pretty decent mid against TA as a side note). Part of it is because he sucks against casters like Puck and Qop, but he's still a very good hero against say a Dragon Knight or a Beastmaster mid(granted you don't see beastmaster that often anymore either), basically melees.
Dota competitive picks are often based on trends and sheep mentality, as well as recurring meta counters(meta is x, then everyone plays y because it counters x, then everyone players z cause it counters y, then everyone finds out that x actually counters z so it goes back to that). It's pretty fun to watch over long periods.
In pubs though, everything is viable. Like literally everything.
