I believe it's not about whether the game is actually any good or not. It's about what Highguard represents.
Let's be honest, hero shooter isn't an oversaturated genre in any sense. Upon looking up what hero shooters are available right now I managed to find around five of them: Overwatch 2, Fragpunk, Valorant, Apex Legends, Paladins. If Highguard survives it will be the sixth.
That number is a joke compared to boomer shooters (which itself I'd argue isn't oversaturated in the first place) and downright sad compared to metroidvanias or deckbuilders. Don't even think about incrementals. But those releases don't get this near unanimous levels of animosity from the community.
The fact is liveservice games completely lost any goodwill they once might have had. 90% of the time nobody is excited when a new one is announced because almost nobody respects this genre. It's primarily seen as a soulless, corporate product made for maximum profit potential, and nine times out of ten that is true. Even if you give one a shot it can disappear a few years later (or two weeks in case of Concord), so all the money and time you've invested is down the drain. It's no wonder people look at this game and immediately start thinking about the apology tweet and the end of service announcement.
I believe if hero shooter devs want to be taken seriously by the community they need to adopt the Xonotic model. Xonotic is a community developed open source arena shooter. In Xonotic hosting and moderating the servers is the community's job. This immediately solves everything and is the reason a game with a playerbase measured in dozens can be sustained with effectively zero monetization. Translating this to a commerical title can be quite tricky but I think it has great potential.
A big feature AND problem with the live-service market is that gamers STAY engaged with the games. The majority of players play your random RTS for a few weeks, maybe a month, and then move on. But these live service hero shooters keep pumping out content to keep players invested and build in a ton of engagement sinks so you won't leave.
As a result, you can't have "The next Marvel Rivals" like you had "The next Command and Conquer" or "The next Battlefield", because everyone is still playing the current Marvel Rivals. That results in a completely saturated market. If you want a player, you're going to have to drag them away from their current game, which they're comfortable with and have a massive investment in.
If you're releasing the next Assassin's Creed, you don't need to be amazing, you just need to wait for people to finish the last one and deliver something pretty nice. Maybe it's better, maybe it's worse, but the field is empty so who cares. For Live-Service, you don't just need to be better than the rest, you need to be sufficiently better that all the players are willing to abandon their huge investment in the other game and switch to you.
And well, your game might dissapear any second, while their game has been around for years and surely will stay around foreeeever.
Its the same reason why WOW has persisted as long as it has, even with how dodgy the company has become year after year, they're still tied at the top because it's player base is locked in.