Percentage vs the entire playerbase doesn’t care about participation.
If both game modes have low digit participation and thus gear distribution, then it’s fine that those modes of gear have higher and equivalent rewards.
In the end, high end PvP and high end PvE deserve equalish reward schemes.
In HFC ? Yeah it was. The only gear that closed the gap with Conquest gear, but never quite did, was gear from the last 3 bosses on Mythic.
Everything else was trumped severely. Remember : HFC had an incremental ilvl gear scheme, where the first few bosses on Mythic dropped near the same ilvl as Archimonde on Heroic.
Mythic raiders coming out of Mythic Foundry didn’t.
New alts did, because the tanaan 695s were a pain to farm, but the ilvl 700 PvP stuff in the last season was handed out like Candies.