We don't need them anymore.

[FeyFavilla]

Stress and anxiety to perform is most certainly something tied to Ranked, yeah - but being screamed at in this community, at least in EU, is something I have experienced as often as I can count on half of a hand. Generally bad behaviour if it is done in ingame chat is easily punishable with a GM report, so that keeps things at bay.

On the other hand... the mode is just not worth the time investment, plain and simple. Stress and anxiety can be moderately mitigated if not overcome, but if you got no reason to even stay other than "I like pvp but I want to play in my skill bracket", then it's not worth fighting your inner demons over it.

I love ranked pvp, I dont even have any anxiety about it - and it's still not worth doing it for me, there's nothing worth the effort at the end of the road. That's time I could be playing ranked in games that reward me, or getting other stuff done.

I disagree, sorry.
While I have not gone into competitive in this game in particular I have in my fair share of multiplayer games in the past. I can tell you from experience after having slacked on my rewards one season and being forced to grind CC, because I would not be able to get my rewards just from daily frontlines anymore, that if you do not perform and your team loses you have about a 50/50 chance of one or more of your teammates spamming one of the callouts aggressively before either going afk or just leaving. I know not everyone is like that but the pressure to perform is very real and the negative, toxic feedback is too. And if unranked, which most people will play first, is this bad, then they will absolutely not even want to try ranked, especially since it is just pretty common knowledge in any game how angry ranked players tend to get, no offense to anyone in here. The environment just breeds a lot of tension. I get that.
Even in frontlines, that are so damn casual, will you have more often than not people screaming at each other in chat. It's just not a fun experience for some. I know that this is exactly what others like tho, so not arguing it's bad content, just answering the question why someone would avoid specifically ranked PvP. Folks are scared of it for a reason and sometimes even just one really, really bad experience can stop them from trying ever again.