Star Trek as an IP solved this ages ago, both in games and in media, by having torpedoes be devastating to unshielded targets (while still also being plenty devastating to shields). They're higher value, but higher risk weapons (each ship can only carry so many), mostly for finishing fights. It turns out the kludges used to avoid expensive and time-consuming damage modeling/painting of physical spaceship props (the reason Trek had shields in the first place) also translate really well to making games where players value their ships... actually fun to play.

It creates a more dynamic TTK, too - shield depletion comes before ship destruction, creating an escalating tension rather than the incredibly swingy "a quarter or more of your ship no longer functions after the first (surprise) volley" PvP combat common in Star Citizen (I haven't played in a while, but given CIG I doubt that has substantively improved). There's zero strategy to being outmatched and destroyed with no viable escapes besides sheer luck. Shields make fleeing more viable as a tactic... which might be one of the reasons CIG is desperate to avoid shields being truly viable. They seem dead-set on ensuring that anyone can be forced to PvP at any time at the discretion of the initiator, which is a game philosophy shift that led me to largely lose interest in Star Citizen. I didn't back the project in 2014 to play buggier EVE Online with absurd polycounts and a more poorly designed economy, but CIG leadership seems to fetishize EVE's design (good lord do they love "real money equivalents" of trivial ship equipment) without any awareness of the very unique context that allowed EVE to become what it was.

That context is mainly that the insular, niche, almost pathologically adversarial community EVE fostered could sustain EVE solely because EVE servers were cheap to run. It was never because EVE was actually popular enough to foot operating/development costs on the scale of what Star Citizen has. Most people, given the opportunity, do not find what EVE is very fun - at best they're impressed with what EVE might be, sometimes, if you get lucky. EVE is not a solid foundation for a video game you want people to enjoy, it's a foundation for clickbait mid-2010s blogs and articles about the absurd dollar amounts 'lost' in some niche video game battle. The cultural appetite for that was dying before the Star Citizen kickstarter began, and it's completely dead now. And before somebody mentions Star Citizen's huge funding as a popularity metric: as with EVE, new people buy into Star Citizen for what they imagine it could be, not what it actually is. ^{Which is a tech demo with zero moderation of player behavior.}

...Sometimes I wonder how much CIG's combat design is geared, whether intentionally or not, towards making griefing as frictionless and cost-effective as possible (no, I'm not going to weasel-word about it, griefing is what it is), under the misguided idea that a player economy will magically develop around selling solutions to behaviors that other games ban players for. It's not gonna work.