It’s not quite the same. For instance it is much harder to lose in PVE until you pass into the stuff you are just doing for fun like mythic 20+.
There is no gating of gear saying that only the top players can upgrade their gear. You are only playing against the clock. If you were playing against lets say,
The fastest 20% in the dungeon got to get gear and you get nothing until you are in that group. Once you are in the fastest 20% then you unlock 207 item level. Once you are in the fastest 15% you can get to 213. And so on up to the top 1% at 226.
The other thing to take into consideration is that when I finish the +15 achievement it is account bound. So all my alts benefit from it. Meaning they no longer have to grind M+ they can just grind 0s and go straight to 220. That is totally different in PVP. In PVP every character needs to fend for itself. Or like I am stating here they pay boosters to fend for them. If I could grind 2400 on my mage and then all my accounts benefit from it we wouldn’t be having this discussion. Or if they gated pvp and pve as I said by only allowing the top players to improve their gear. Then we would have a dead game instead of a discussion. That’s how bad this system is in PVP. If it carried over into PVE nobody would play the game anymore. And as you’re the numbers drop the brackets shrink and become harder to get into. Just imagine how bad PVE would be if you got nothing from it because some pros in 226 just time gated the +5 bracket so you just locked in at 200 and could never move because you simply can’t compete with the raw dps increase from 207 to 226.