As far as I've seen, shotguns are seldom used and with good reason. They aren't consistent enough for all but the most skilled of players. So why is that? Shotguns as a concept are a weapon designed to reward leading moving targets, while requiring little in the way of precise aiming, and that is how the developers made them for this game. In Apex however, shotguns are useless outside of 2-5 feet simply due to the fact that leading targets is punished by the movement system in this game. There is little to no inertia when jumping, sliding and flying through the air aren't concerned, meaning a player can switch from strafing left to strafing right as fast as they can tap the keys. I recall that it was previously so difficult to hit a player such as a Wraith that the developers removed some third person animations as they would literally allow Wraith to duck her head so far back and forth that headshots were impossible, and hitting her was a monumental challenge.
As far as I can see, the only possible ways to fix this would be to:
A: Remove shotguns as a whole,
B: Make the shotguns use hitscan (which I can't imagine going well),
or C: Add inertia to left/right strafing so that leading targets isn't punished
I'd appreciate some constructive ideas, counter-arguments, and discussion on this to maybe get the devs to level the playing field for our shottys somewhat.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/apexlegends/comments/ilg6kz/the_lack_of_strafing_inertia_and_the_resulting/