Games

It makes games more samey because they focus on what pros want, and they like things to be the same. It also tends to drive balance patches to only focus on the top levels of play, so the experience is worse for the majority of players. Features that aren't directly related to the pro-scene get completely ignored.

Play tends to get more toxic even at low levels, because ladder rank is all that really matters. The increased focus on being competitive increases the stress to play well in each game.

Competitive formats are often one of the least popular game modes. It's a bit hard to prove this, because companies don't always release numbers. Blizzard admitted this with SC2, the vast majority of players never queued for a competitive 1v1 match, co-op became by far the most popular format in terms of games played. You saw something similar with complaints about available modes in halo when infinite released.

Esports are actually pretty boring to watch 90% of the time. Most have a major lack of parity so there's at best a handful of teams/players that are actually competitive, so many matches are one sided.

i agree with op's take but only in the sense that games made with the intent to be esports end up being antithetical to what makes games enjoyable, at least for me. it kinda feels new pvp games are exclusively targeting competitive gamers and the casual online pvp space is shrinking or being driven to older games.

but that might just be my own aversion to being told to take my own life by an angry teenager when I make a mistake while playing with a digital toy to enjoy my time off work.

I can kinda see it with how hyper competitive games have gotten at the detriment of fun. Now we have match making with hidden elo vs back in the day just playing on dedicated servers. But it's not all bad.