I agree, the only game I played that game close to this was Lost Saga 2009-2010 version, but since then the game has rapidly become more and more atrocious each year, I haven't looked into it since 2012 but I don't want to. It only had esports for one year in WCG, and it was really successful, enjoyable for everyone participating.
Sadly I don't see the greedy & incompetent developers that turned what could've been the greatest fighting game of all time into one of the worst ones in existence rebooting LS entirely into the 2008/9 CBT version and giving it to a company like Riot Games who are already big in Esports but also know a fair monetizing model. LS could also work with keep the game the same and building around what's already good since the original version was entirely about teamwork, players individual ability, and how much knowledge you had about the game with endless depth. Carrying, clutching back in LS's prime were some of the greatest moments I had in my 20 years of gaming since my heart was beating whole time and I had to put in ridiculous effort to outsmart, counter, and outplay people 1vs2/3/4. Dodging, blocking, built in characters countering, manual countering, guard breaks, unique real life movements were all in this game and more.
The pros and most praised players constantly shaped the new meta by countering the old one over and over, everyone else just followed us though and this is when the game became more about spending cash & focused on stats and skills, monetized epic gears (you can now use other characters abilities, imagine having part of passive and skills from 5 of any champs you want in LoL and being able to upgrade them permanently) so people kept upgrading the gears to spam skills like crazy & legendary gear(special gear you had to buy or get with god-like RNG that belong to no character and had really useful mechanics). To make it worse everyone started upgrading certain gears to cap and min-maxing the meta, people were too afraid to invest in anything else that may or may not be good so you always saw the same strategies, and got a ton of hate if you used a strategy that could easily beat the meta. Sure all of this was bad but overall LS was still good at heart and everything in OP applied to the game, you could win with spending nothing if you were good enough and outplay any situation. The game got literally x1000000 worse every year though.
New players used to join in hopes of being as good as the pros they watched and learning more about LS, then all the "pros" dissipated since anyone could claim to be the best cause of how stupid, P2W, and pointless the game became.
The original idea of this game was taking heroes, ideas, mercenaries, fighters from everywhere (Struggled with a lot of copyright and people wanting guys like Goku, Ichigo, etc) and putting them into a sandbox with limitless possibilities for combat and real time strategy + tactics.