>>96269534
Monks and (as of 5.5e) barbarians are both inherently magical but are still generally considered martials. Or at least I've never seen someone call monks and barbarians casters. As the name implies, casters are just classes with the spellcasting feature, some other classes have magic but not spellcasting.

Worth noting that 4e defined the martial "power source" as non-magical, but also gave them explicitly superhuman abilities on par with casters, so go figure.

>>96268620
>>96262967
>CRs tell you the party level that four characters should have to be able to defeat a given monster with zero character deaths.
>Nothing about CR implies equality or parity, and nothing is pretending them as equal.

CR is actually defined in the book like this:

>Challenge Rating (CR) summarizes the threat a monster poses to a group of four player characters. Compare a monster's CR to the characters' level. If the CR is higher, the monster is likely a danger. If the CR is lower, the monster likely poses little threat.

So the general assumption is that at the same level, parties will probably find a higher CR monster threatening and a lower CR monster unthreatening, which implies roughly the same level of power. There's no suggestion that CR applies differently to martials and casters.

>But nothing about levels suggests they imply equality in class output.

This is implied by the "Tiers of Play" in 5e, which say that parties at the same level bracket (1-5, 5-10, etc) were dealing with the same kind of challenges. There's no suggestion that a party of casters is at a different tier to a party of martials, for example (eg. that wizards are in Tier 4 when fighters are in Tier 2).

It's also worth noting that the design goals for the fighter in 5e included explicitly that they were equal to wizards at high levels. Of course they failed to hit this goal, but no one would say the system is perfect.