Seems like poor writing. One thing they could have done was give her transmutation powers a severe limit. Like she has to physically touch something to transmute it or maybe it takes like several minutes to actually transmute something so she’s open to attack. Either of those are better than her just deciding not to use it when she clearly could of as she’s used her transmute powers multiple times in season 2 especially and barely looked tired doing so.

invincible rant

I don’t know what’s going on with Reddit but apparently my response is too long or something so I’ll just post a link to a google doc about my response. I do agree with most of what you said though.