Eh, that feeling mostly comes from a misunderstanding on how generation works, no thanks to the marketing. There is actually a way more reasonable amount of actual weapons determined by a set of other parts. especially past Common rarity. Even on super lategame play like NG+ 3 OP8, there's definitively a niche for a lot of those weapons. Of course, that doesn't make it so that because of exponential scaling, stingy drops and more normalized weapon gen, there's nowhere near a majority of viable let alone fun weapons, which is where the first game was pretty different, because of linear scaling and an entirely different generation system.
That said, all content on the first NG is perfectly doable with whatever weapons you can find, for as long as they're *at least* at the same level of the content you're facing. Legendaries are cool, but getting quests will usually net you Uniques, which are also pretty fantastic on their own for getting by.