Artifact is easily the worst card game ever made... which is actually impressive when you think about it.
It's astonishing how they managed to mess this up.
And while that's disappointing, the unfortunate reality of Artifact is that it will always be around. Forever. It can never be undone. Valve'cels will forever live with the fact that Valve messed up yet another game.

Firstly, I'm aware people complain about how monetization killed the game, the gameplay is fine. Of course, pay2pay was awful, but about -2 Million bought the game. Let's say 1 million. That means that a 1 million players decided to quit, all together, despite already paying for the game. The lack of progression systems can't explain this. Yugioh legacy formats lack these systems and thousands play them anyway. Heartstone and MTG have insane prices and millions play them. There's no justification for this. If the gameplay is fun, people will play the game, regardless of the lack of shiny level ups and daily rewards and battlepasses and whatever. (in fact, Dota Turbo + Custom Games offer basically no rewards and people play anyway; see that, Valve?)

People declaring this argument is more of a selection effect, survivorship bias. All the people who remain, the -30 or so players, are the ones who remain after 1 million quit. Of course, they'll love the gameplay. But they're not representative of the general cardgame-playing population, nor we should pretend that's the case.

Every Card Game has randomness from the very start of the match. That's fine and up to certain point it's part of the appeal. It adds variance to the game. It's wholesome up to some extent. But Valve's Artifact goes way beyond:
Card position is random (And I assume starting Heroes, their starting Lanes and their positions are random too).
Card attack order is random.
Item shop is random.
The gold, which you need in order to buy stuff, is random too as the position of creeps is random.
Plenty of card effects in the game are random, most of the time with a neutral vs. positive result, because we needed even more randomness. What is this, a sort of autobattler? I'm not even playing the game, I don't have agency, control; I don't have fun.
Plenty of games have been won and lost due to random attack order, Games which last 40 minutes btw due to the next flaw.

What exactly was Richard Garfield thinking when he decided to have 3 boards at the same time?
"Well, like, Dota has, like, 3 lanes so, like it was a no-brainer, brah."
Maybe he thought that, because it's a Computer game, he could get away with it?
Here we have a game with the information load of an RTS but with the agency of an autobattler. You have to keep track of, what could be roughly translated as, 3 Planewalkers on each side of the field, with 2 more coming, and rotating; then the continuous effects on each single lane, the mana on each single lane, the HP of the Tower on each single lane, etc. From the very first turn.
Did they even playtest this? How many times?

Then you have the intercalated turns. I play a card, you play one card. Which may sound interesting, until you realize that a player can take up to 30s for each card. Given the random nature of EVERYTHING, and the inherent chaos of intercalated turns, players can't really plan ahead, so every micro-decision needs to be reevaluated constantly. That's how you end up with 40 min games.
And if a player doesn't have enough mana for their hand? Well, he has to wait 30s for each card his opponent plays, pressing end turn, then another 30s. Amazing experience.

Of course, it wouldn't be that bad if there were some interaction between to two players. That's the point of intercalated turns, right? Negates, Floodgates, etc., are a thing in Card Games; of course, they exist here, right? Right?
As far as I'm aware, there's no such thing as a negate in this game. If your opponent gets an OP item (there's one which effectively bounces the enemy each turn. Yes, there's Yata-lock in this game.) from the RANDOM shop, there's basically nothing you can do. You can't even destroy the enemy because attack order is random, although he would revive anyway. There's no negate, or destroy, or shuffle to deck; nothing. Your only option if the enemy gets a random OP item is for you to get another random item, with a random target, and hope you get your target. Amazing design.

Maybe everything's random because that's how Valve works. One day you invest millions into your project, the next day you toss a coin and abandon the game because you got tails or something.

"Uhmm, there's like, a couple of cards in the game that let you interact with attack order or something."
Which shouldn't be a thing.
"But I DID quit due to monetization."
I don't deny the pay2pay was terrible.