I acknowledged that support characters can be useful. But I wasn't really able to get most of the tank characters to meaningfully tank. The high damage, status effects, and continually increasing amounts of enemies just meant that most tanks didn't really function well.A lot varies based on difficulty, on lower difficulties you can muddle through with anything, so tanks or support characters serve no purpose and just drag missions out where you can take more damage dealers instead. On the highest difficulties tanks and supports are reportedly mandatory.
Bleed is not a great status, admittedly, but he's a very damage focused character so he does well just from that. Plus Reaper can put bleed stacks to good use.
As for Blade, I'd put him in largely the same category as Captain Marvel. You can make them work, but largely only by sabotaging what you're doing in other ways, and other characters are going to be better in their role. Like, you mention Reaper can really use stacks of bleed, and sure, it can. And it also makes your quick shots better. But getting to that point requires you to either get super lucky with his passive or spend 2 actions, 1 to add bleed to his cards, one to actually inflict the bleed, and you generally want several stacks so it probably means using his chain to get several stacks. Which would deal a heft chuck of damage, but that's spending 3 actions to hammer one target. And the damage isn't out of line for what others can do, but with less action expenditure. The issue is just that bleed isn't great and it's not cheap to apply, but that's what his entire kit is based on.