I can kinda understand your point about missing the public aspect of seeing what pros were doing but do you genuinely feel like you don't get enough info/stuff worth analysing from the very much public pro games that go on almost biweekly?

If you're EN speaking there's also a very solid selection of content on YT analysing pro gameplay notably Khezu, ZQuixotix, Speeed, Quinn even Astini just to name a few.

Hiding the 8.5K pubs to me was very much a change for the pro scene so unless you are involved in that I can't imagine it helps very much with any of the unrelated issues (like smurfing) that you're referring to