And this is why your take on any of this is mostly if not entirely irrelevant. Because balance matters. Changes matter. How the game plays matter. All of these things matter immensely as a reflection of what people do with their time and how well they do it.
This is also why folks trying to reduce video games to “it is just pixels” is such a dishonest take. Your bank account is literally just 1s and 0s, and since money is a social construct and a societal concept that we agree matters as part of society… but it is just paper or metal in some cases. But we still apply value to these things, no matter how reductionist of a view one tries to employ.
Balance matters because that is a reflection of how the game played at one particular time or another. These rewards reflect you participating and reaching a certain difficulty threshold during those times. Ergo, the rewards reflect partially the balance of the time.
Removing this just turns everything into a participation trophy, and for that you can read the much longer portion of my reply where I referenced several articles discussing where participation trophies are appropriate and when they are not. The cliffnotes version though is that in virtually any competitive environment, participation trophies are detrimental to the participation, growth, and improvement of those who participate in those competitions - since folks will just opt for a “I can get it when it is easier” because as players get better, the game also gets easier if the requirements are decreased rather than increased (which by referring ot what Meowkitty said in another reply, they are).
If it required people to get to ever increasing ranks, like 3k+, and it increased every expansion so the longer you wait the better you have to be at the game … you could have an argument. But that would make them unavailable in another fashion and just available to those players who typically don’t care for these things.
People who push extremely hard do so typically because they like the challenge. Not to get a particular rare reward. There are exceptions but, we are talking about the exceptions to the rule in a category of less than a 1% of a 1% of the top-of-the-top players. Meaning… that is entirely negligible.
sorry bud you’re the minority.