I always felt like the way you need to be playing AoE to be competitively good defeated the purpose of the game for me. It ends up become a rush of min maxing, as opposed to what I loved about the game which was building and designing empires and armies.
Because it makes them money. See, monolithic companies don’t care about anything other than money and pleasing shareholders. The only way they will ever care about real life issues is if/when they transform into loss of revenue or pressure from their board of directors.
I think it’s a little about how they don’t know better either, and there’s no better options. You and I remember when multiplayer games used to be great, but if nowadays they’re all shit, what option do they have?