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Nah, you can play around CS. Cheap spells, spells you don't care too much about, that kinda thing. It's a tax and spell eater, and that's fine. There's bigger issues; a mixture of draw secrets, board clears and high tempo minions are always tough. Keeping cheap spells and knowing what you can afford to toss to it is a skill testing facet of playing against secret mage. Same with stuff like Loatheb.
When it comes to playing around secrets, the main pains for fair decks are the twin threats of mirror entity and runes; one encourages dropping something small/easily removed, the otherencourages dropping something with high HP.
Still feel like crystal runner is a lot of the issue, due to that typically being a lot of the decks' power, but there's no denying that boardwipe with secret fellow and rigged faire game have helped a lot with some of the weaknesses of the deck, which is a large part of why it's so common.
Because that's how metagames go. Literally, in the history of hearthstone, there's been miniscule times when classes have >2 viable decks simultaneously, and most have one at a time. Having 20 relatively balanced decks is quite an ask (particularly when blizz don't want combo to be top-tier), and that's just with two per class. Blizzard devs - IMO - aren't capable enough to balance that many decks, and that's not really an insult to them.
Problematic metagames are usually ones where formats warp heavily around one deck, usually to the extent that you see deckbuilding choices to up win rate in the meta. Prime example from MTG - Mental misstep. Heavily warped the metagame to the extent that you'd have deckslike goblins running misstep just to counter.... misstep. In HS, the Hysterical Tiller decks warped the meta, and usually focussed on beating the mirror and secret mage.
In addition, whilst Blizz do balance stuff for Wild, it's a secondary concern, and you'll not see the same attention that WotC gives to MTG's eternal formats, for example (though since I've stepped away they've gone wonky on powercreep, tbh).
Same place as entire classes, I'd wager. Face hunter (where's the other hunters anyway? Remember midrange hunter?)/DHs/Shammies? Most classes will have 1-2 archetypes, so that one archetype has subsumed others isn't really an issue. It's traditionally only been lock (zoo/hand), rogue (miracle/tempo), hunter (face/midrange) and mage (freeze/tempo) that have had multiple viable decks, with pirate warrior not really overlapping with CW due to the core cards in that deck getting powercreeped. I guess Patron and CW overlapped too.
Lack of variance is the way things go.
Eh, as someone who likes to run jank that dies to secret mage (adding secret hate would weaken the combo to a hilarious degree), that's the game. It's dominant, it's common as muck, but something always is. Most non-jank can at least put up a fight, and I take the losses to mages on the chin because janky combo. Something will be dominant. Could probably do with being taken down a notch, but shouldn't take much; a minor nerf to kabal crystal runner would probably sort it. It can also get shredded by most decks with tech cards.
It also feels worse because combo mages were dominant before secret mage.