It's one of those things where its true on paper but as soon as you are out there, its totally different.
Basic US infantry doctrine puts a base of fire as the 'center' of a manuever. Generally, this would be the SAW (in a perfect scenerio) but not always. Regardless, the basic premise is that this base of fire engage and suppress the enemy and their movements while flanking elements work there way towards the enemy and destroy them.
This generally requires a good amount of ammunition to sustain.
On a larger scale in places like Afghanistan where you didn't really bump patrols at closer ranges but rather get pot shotted at from 500+ yards by and assortment of Mosin Nagents, AK's and a PKM; the distance to close was much greater and usually resulted in not being able to successfully flank/advance on the enemy in time or had you at a disadvantage as the engagement started with you in a far ambush with nothing but open ground between you and them.
This scenerio is where the push of 'firepower superiority' all of a sudden came from. It's literally, get as many guys shooting in the general direction of the enemy and hope you have more people effectively shooting/suppressing than they do. This was a 2 part approach to 'winning' these engagements; first, your offense put them in the defense, thus having them shoot at you less. Second, if they weren't very smart or experienced, this would pin them for enough time to get your flanking elements onto them (unlikely as they were usually pretty far and in an elevated/superior position), get lucky with some column of gun trucks were passing by and could form up on a blocking manuever or to have CAS show up, as calling them is pretty much Step2 these days preceded by only 'start shooting back'. However, they would mostly be withdrawn by then as they have our CAS response times down pretty well and/or limit themselves to a set amount of engagement time and then pull back.
You can imagine how many rounds have gone out in just a 2 minute ordeal with this bullshit.
So take those scenerios and replace all of our weapons with bolt guns or something and let me know how you envision that working itself out.
P.S. - Accuracy based weapons require standoff distance as well as make the element 'slow' as you have to stop/aim to effectively engage the enemy.