You’re mistake is thinking it’s a sandbox game. In my.opinion, it’s barely even a survival thing.
Sure, over the years they have added a lot of systems, but as you noticed, they’re all pretty shallow, and on top of that, have basically no interaction with each other.
Games as a Service wasn’t even the fatal flaw here. Brawlhalla is another platform fighter that is doing just fine off that model. The dev team for MultiVersus just couldn’t handle the project, for one reason or another.
A lot of speculation on the specifics of what went wrong, plenty of players looking for who to blame, but there will probably never be any reliable or concrete info on what exactly happened.
Why are video uploading sites supposed to be free? It costs money to build and maintain them, especially at a scale “for the masses”.
Honestly, I’d prefer it if YouTube had just been a subscription you paid for. Better money for the creators, and Google would have had less incentive to harvest every piece of possible personal data about their users to give to advertisers.