Comment by hamdingers

> and the playerbase overwhelmingly prefers matchmaking

The server browser is buried under a couple layers of obtuse menus (and, at present, is completely broken on my SteamOS machine) while matchmaking is obvious and straightforward. You cannot come to any reasonable conclusions about player preference given the way the UI drives players towards matchmaking and away from servers. If they were presented on equal footing you might have a point.

Consider also TF2. It launched as a server-based game, and in the years after matchmaking was added Valve went through many UX iterations designed to drive traffic to it before it was more popular.