Most people don’t want to spend large amounts of time “getting good” and don’t enjoy getting matched up against players that absolutely destroy them, but instead prefer more casual games against other players with middling skills. The thing is though, even if highly competitive games include an unranked queue intended for casuals, it ends up being filled with smurfs[0] and the like looking to smash lower skilled players, which drains the fun from the game for those players. Thinking about it that way, it’d make perfect sense if the most popular PvP games would be those that are shunned by the highly competitive - a lack of “pro” players might be considered a feature rather than a bug.
[0]: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/17209/where-does...
Normal players would like to participate in the progression systems you design! Having a ranked queue that is uninviting to normal players due to skill, and an unranked queue that is uninviting to everyone due to progression design, but less uninviting to normal players than the ranked queue, is a pretty suboptimal result.
It's lately become a lot more popular to just secretly (or at least stealthily) put people in with bots. Marvel Snap was really successful at emulating opponents at low ranks and gradually increasing real opponent density the higher you are. Battle Royale games with 100 players per game can easily add a bunch of bots so you aren't at the bottom and can even win. I noticed Mario Kart World also has bots in most knockout matches (and I highly appreciate that it is transparent about this fact.)
This is to say nothing of the rampant cheating in the game, which if a person ever gets banned for, there is nothing stopping them from just spending 10$ on a replacement account.