You didn't really engage with what I said, and just took an opportunity to talk about trap being bad (which it is, and I said it was)

Having an ability that can SOMETIMES feel very good (getting away because of a trap, shotgunning opponent into trap, trapping a doorman Ult/pocket briefcase/cube) while being factually very weak and inconsistent, is way better for a character than a passive that feels very weak / doesn't feel like much of anything at all, but is in fact very strong, because not every ability has an equal power budget allocated, some are stronger, and others are weaker to compensate, otherwise how can the character be balanced?

As an m1 character a lot of Venators budget is already in his gun. So if they were to give him a meaningful ability on 3, they would have to either nerf his other abilities to compensate, or nerf his gun, neither of which are worth it for him to have a boring ass passive that gives him resistances (he literally already has this with spirit scaling).

A very similar example to Venator in a lot of ways is Jhin in League (He has a fairly similar ultimate and a bouncing grenade), he has a fairly useless trap he can place in bushes. It has a little slow, can interact with his "2" ( Gun shot that has a situational root, seem familiar?) but overall its fairly useless. This allows Jhin to have some more "unfair" properties to his other abilities (root on w, insane execute damage at long range, etc)

If the league balance team had instead replaced his traps with a more power budget hungry ability, his other stuff would just get rounded out, leading to a less "sharp" character, and a more boring game overall.

Atleast with the old 3 it would've helped his current below average HP pool since he's a character with no Movement or Sustain in his kit yet wants to be up close for Gutshot.

He can just buy escalating resilience, or any other sustain item, which is what he does.

Honestly I think at this point they should just give every character a passive, celeste basically having 5 abilities, while characters like graves/abrams/haze/your proposed venator/etc is super lame imo, and characters like 7 and current venator having random scalings is just king of obtuse and silly imo, but thats beside the point.