People treat it seriously because the rewards are extreme.

There's an existing disconnect

Content difficulty that is EXTREMELY casual + uncapped rewards that are currently locked behind locked-out end game content that most people have not even seen let alone beaten in some cases = recipe for disaster.

You're joking to yourself if you think people are just going to try another route when there's literally no reason to do anything else right now provided you're able to actually get the rewards (Myth, Soldiery, AND Sands and Oils available), though now that it's gotten to the point where people are using 3rd party apps to detect them that alone should speak to how broken the current system is. The only way to solve it is to gut the rewards to match the difficulty of the content.