TxBF vs OFDMA

In the past, Transmit Beamforming (TxBF) was a very powerful way to deliver quality service to 802.11 clients in noisy environments. TxBF uses RF properties to "steer" RF transmission at where the transmitter believes the receiver to be.

However, with the advent of OFDMA in WiFi 6, TxBF is becoming less relevant. Pre-OFDMA, when an AP transmitted, it would only simultaneously transmit data intended for one recipient. With OFDMA, the transmission can be divided up into 2+ "Resource Units" (RUs), where each RU is intended to be demodulated by a different receiving client device. This means that the transmission is intended to be received by more than one client device, which negates the value of TxBF.

Practically speaking, this negates a competitive advantage that previously applied to manufacturers that were very good at producing TxBF capable APs because targeting the transmission at exactly one client makes OFDMA irrelevant.

As far as I know, I assume that OFDMA is a superior solution because that seems to be the direction that WiFi is heading. But I wonder if that's at the detriment of environments where there is more non 802.11 background noise and lower spatial density of clients.