Weapons do degrade rather fast for what you'd expect from a gun, but it's deliberate, with the tension meant to come from resource management as well as the randomly respawning elements. It's a melee heavy game and if you accept it as such, where you're going to be using your melee frequently on low priority enemies to save ammo and maintenance tools, it's really not so bad. It's also not too hard to implement tactics to manage the weapon degradation system such as pumping Maintenance to 3 or 4 quickly (or using the PSI that stops it if you prefer). Once you're at Maint 3 or 4 you can pretty much use ranged weapons full time since you squeeze a ton of shots out from each maintenance tool, especially using high efficiency weapons in terms of degradation like the laser pistol set to overcharge mode (which also is super efficient in energy use when upgraded twice).
Spoiler
There's also several weapons with the secret property that they will degrade but never jam, meaning you need never worry about repairing them or maintaining them. It is most likely a bug in how they were setup. This includes the very first shotgun you find that isn't broken in the game:
https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=9964&s=
The Shotgun near the corpse behind the Machinery on the upper level of the storage room across from Watts' quarters, in addition to being the first working Shotgun, is unbreakable and has reduced recoil!
https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=9964&s=
The Shotgun near the corpse behind the Machinery on the upper level of the storage room across from Watts' quarters, in addition to being the first working Shotgun, is unbreakable and has reduced recoil!