If you step back a moment and really think about where popular multi-player games come from, the answer is almost always that they start out as some janky mod; not from the original intent of the game's developers. This is especially true for entire genres: CS(Action Quake), TF2(Quakeworld Team Fortress), DotA(DotA mod for Warcraft III and to some extent the Aeon of Strife custom map in StarCraft), PubG(DayZ), even the activity of speedrunning can be seen as a mod.
It seems like a really bad idea to try to forcefully create "the next big thing", instead of just using your eyeballs and looking around to see what people are enjoying, and then developing that into a fully fledged game or game mode. It's the same mindset large companies have when it comes to quality control: we'll make it perfect so we don't have to deal with any issues later. Guess what... you can test it all you like, but once you give your product to a million monkeys, they will find their own unique and unpredictable ways to use and break it. At some point, you need to stop kidding yourself by trying to pre-empt everything and just chuck your product out there and observe what your customers do with it.
If Quake Champions weren't running on a Frankenstein engine and they had put some effort into making a proper defrag mode with interactive tutorials, maps and achievements, I think it would already have drawn in many more players. The game has half a dozen movement styles for heaven's sake, why not play into that more and get players through the door that way?
Edit: This is also why it's absolutely brainless that all these companies want to lock down their games these days, not offering self-hosted servers or modding avenues.