It always was. In season 1 it was best played like any fun, regular game.
As you say, marketing called one of it’s game modes ‘Competitive’ and pretended it was some special way of playing.
It isn’t and it never was. A way to suck people into playing it. All in all, it still is a fun game, though honestly a lot less fun since Blizzard took things away from players rather than fixing their characters.