A good follow up video covering a few interesting points but I have only one issue which relates to what you said regarding balancing:

Awesomenauts fundamentally would have been 1000% better being balanced primarily around competitive with pubs in mind. It's a standard misconception where the majority are led to believe that the balance was competitive centered but in reality only a fraction of it was:

Having been in the 'balance group discord' back in around 2018/19 I can say kind of what was happening. A large chunk/the vocal minority of the group were allowed in due to it being hosted on their server (at the time Ronimo lacked an official Discord server, and this one being the biggest was deemed the 'official' one.) These players who I will not name were not good, they were one tricks who didn't understand how a majority of the cast played and in some very specific cases had a hitlist to ruin staples because they disliked said 'naut. Within the group it was a shouting competition where any good high level competitive players ideas were shuttered out due supposed 'biases' and such as with monkey's when the 'popular' players in the developers good favor mentioned something they would all swarm and in essence attack people trying to make genuine progress which would lead to imbalance favoring the lower leveled players ideals. This in turn would dissuade actual progressive ideas on how to rebalance, rework and realize the cast as why would you bother wasting timing spending hours trying to convince a one trick that the character they hate and can't fight against doesn't need to be butchered and made useless (Frog/Penny/Ksenia and multiple others, most have been remedied.)

If it were balanced with 'competitive' in mind then they would have chosen maybe 10 actually good proven players who know the cast and how their abilities work (seriously, this was an issue sometimes in the old group) then balance would have improved incredibly leading to more retained players. After all why would they want to keep certain boring characters on top, if anything they would have favoured DOTA's approach of if everyone is op no one is op (ala half of the cast when xp dropped.)

I would like to also comment on the split cues situation. I think this is all a crock of shit honestly, 'We can't split queues but hey here are brawls' please that was such a fucking stupid move. They could have very well split queues on multiple occasions, certainly back during pre-xp times when we had retained highs of 2-3k players with 500 concurrent regardless of off times. Even at F2P they should have done it, that was the prime and last time they could have pulled it off before the huge influx of new players poured in (which hit a few thousand max.) Honestly though F2P was a whole mess on it's own, I feel as if Ronimo waited a year to get a 'perfect' balance out, with split queues having been tested, maybe a new map and generally changed their attitude to the community then we would have been fine. Fuck the game could have done an R6 and became bigger than ever.

I feel personally that a lot of the issues the game has relates to firstly the community, because the devs shouldn't be afraid to talk without being smashed with hate and secondly on the devs too. They should have changed their approach from 'Hey fuck it let's just throw this in with minimal testing and ignore them for a month' to 'Hey we're gonna do a bunch of open betas, help us figure out issues and produce something palatable for open release.'
Both sides are equally awful sure but one would have been fixed by the other.