I don't want to play with just my friends, I as someone who's been playing online games for about 20 years, don't think the playing with many other people part is broken and that is very enjoyable. What's broken is often the choice of server architecture and decision to not have the right amount of moderators to handle reports.
Many games use either partly or entirely P2P decision resolution which is easier to game then purely server side. Then also the gaming industry has been downsizing and automating moderation for years now which means typically the companies with the largest online presence (looking at you ActiBlizzard) don't have enough actual moderators to handle reports and they resort to leaning more heavily on these grey area technologies to catch cheaters. It's fundamentally an issue with expense cutting imo.
Many games use either partly or entirely P2P decision resolution which is easier to game then purely server side. Then also the gaming industry has been downsizing and automating moderation for years now which means typically the companies with the largest online presence (looking at you ActiBlizzard) don't have enough actual moderators to handle reports and they resort to leaning more heavily on these grey area technologies to catch cheaters. It's fundamentally an issue with expense cutting imo.