perhaps arti just isnt worth using when you can play an easier deck the same success.

That's mostly the case. The playrate of Arti isn't impressive because the deck is one of the hardest to pilot in this game. I always met several people in ranked relying on PtP because they use their deck as a "cleaning board tool" and can't figure how to close games. And I'm not talking about the turns where you have 1 second to take each decision because you have an Atomy board to manage.

So people don't bother playing this nightmare where they can just do their dailies with easier decks. But when the tournaments come, you see +50% artifact in all the lists because the deck is still that powerful, whatever the meta is.