In an another forum (GitP, to be precise) nearly 7 years ago, a local forumite decided to divide every single 1st party 3.5 character classes' Niches into 17 categories, then ranking them (1~4, lower is better) per class in an attempt to measure their own Tier list.
They were as follows...
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Person_Man's Niche Ranking System (source)
1) Battlefield Control: Prevent enemies from taking their normal actions and/or movement.
2) Buffer: Increase the abilities of allies.
3) Curiosity: Rarely used but helpful in some meaningful way. (Examples: Forgery, Tongues, Slow Fall, etc)
4) Debuffer: Reduce the abilities of enemies, usually by inflicting status effects.
5) Dominator: Take functional command of enemies.
6) Game Changer: Can proactively reshape the game (or realty) to suit your goals. (Examples: Wish, Miracle, Gate, Psychic Reformation, anything that completely breaks the action economy, etc)
7) Healer: Can restore hit points and remove harmful status effects for allies in combat.
8) Meat Shield: Can stand in the front line of combat with a reasonable chance of not getting killed.
9) Melee Damage: Deal meaningful damage to enemies within reach.
10) Mobility: Can circumvent battlefield control and barriers, and quickly pursue or retreat from enemies.
11) Party Face: Interacts with NPCs in a way that gets desirable results.
12) Ranged Damage: Deal meaningful damage to enemies at a range.
13) Sage: Knows or can find useful information.
14) Scout: Locates enemies, threats, and other useful things while remaining hidden.
15) Thief: Can take things from an enemy and enemy locations without being discovered.
16) Summoner: Can summon allies (or make them) that fills other niches without putting the character directly in harms way.
17) Trapfinder: Find and disarm or bypass traps.
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If all classes in a class based game are supposed to "be best at Something", using the above guideline alone shows that sooner or later some overlap (= violation of niche protection) is bound to happen.
PF2 alone already has 16 published classes and 2 more scheduled to be added next year, and the latter ones are already stoking conflict due to their apparent clunkiness, which disturbed me enough to write this post while holding off the urge to sleep (it's about 2:00 AM here where I live).
As such, would the concepts of Niche Protection and Spotlight Securement be a folly in the end? Or we the players shouldn't give it up and urge the rules developing team to keep up trying to secure it as best as they can?
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I find niche protection more often than not to be fundamentally toxic. Games that value niche protection often end up with awkward holes in design where certain characters can't accomplish certain tasks, purely for the sake of protecting someone else's niche. It also often ends up with mechanics that fundamentally aren't fun or classes that don't work well, but are propped up by whatever exclusive features they hold enough that their actual problems don't get addressed.
Niche protection is especially bad in tabletops, because you're talking about only having a handful of players at any given time, which means of the dozens of options available, only a few of them are going to see play in that session, which is often a long term commitment too.
What does become problematic is when one class is just completely eclipsed by another in all respects, or when one class has a downside to compensate for some perceived advantage and another class is just as good at the first's strength without that same downside.
But that's not an issue of niche protection so much as just plain bad balancing.