I think it’s selling Voobly short to say it just had ranked lobbies. There was a huge infrastructure built up around this lobby system to help people find games. You could see which games your friends or clan members were playing then jump in to spectate them. Lobbies persisted between games, so you could easily have a rematch after finding someone who wanted to play the same settings. And it was easier to spectate tournament games, since you didn’t need to hunt down the players between each match. There was streaming integration, so you could see if someone was casting a series or streaming their PoV. Spectators could chat with each other while watching games together. A “host” could create a lobby for a community game, then swap to be a spectator while 8 other people played.
I think the term “ranked lobbies” is often misused in the conversations about the matchmaking system. Ranked lobbies are just one part of a large ecosystem of tools that Voobly had.
One thing that stands out to me is that top level players pretty much don’t play 4v4s on DE. They don’t use the matchmaking system, and they instead have their own Steam group chat for organizing games. But the games can’t happen “organically” like they did on Voobly. If there are only 10-11 people who want to play certain settings (be it top-level TGs, BF TGs, LN FFAs, etc.), then they could spectate an ongoing game and swap out for another player when it’s over. DE doesn’t have any analogous system for supporting “smaller-population game modes” like these.