I was an enthusiastic early adopter of Artifact, and I still have a lot of thoughts about the game over a year out now (and RIP to it).
Let me just say that Artifact is a weird, enjoyable game, with some flaws. While this video did a pretty good job of summarizing what Artifact was, I think it was pretty unfair about laying the design problems at Richard Garfield's feet.
First of all, Garfield was completely in his right to not stay and "fix the game." His contract expired, and CCG designers typically do not stay on their game to keep working on it. Designing and balancing a continuing game like that is not a one-person job, and there are many past examples of other talented designers stepping in to take the lead on various CCGs. Valve could have addressed the game's issues in a number of ways, on their own, without really changing much of the foundations designed by Garfield. If they weren't equipped to fix it themselves, it makes Valve look like they simply didn't put the necessary resources behind this game to begin with.
And then, the "real money for cards" thing...
I think a lot of the trepidation and anguish about buying/selling Artifact's cards on the Steam Market could be blamed on the Steam Market itself - specifically that nobody understands what the fuck Valve's Steam Market actually is. I don't blame them, because Valve sends a lot of mixed messaging and unclear instruction about what you do with the Steam market and what that money is.
When that market first debuted on Steam, I thought "certainly nobody is paying actual money to buy these stupid trading cards, right?". I still don't know the answer to that, but by now I assume all those transactions are people paying for random Steam novelties with store credit - i.e. Steam bucks they got from selling their own Steam novelties. That's what I would just call, "trading,", and the dollar value is there as an index on what any given thing is worth in relation to another.
What Artifact was trying to do with allowing players to trade cards on the market seemed like it could work, but the market is confusing and it seems to me like people negatively associated the $20 they paid for the game with the value they were trading on the Steam market via the cards. So if you 'lost money' in those transactions somehow, it was like you were getting your $20 buy-in taken away. (It wasn't)
I mean, it's one of the many confusing messages that Valve communicated about this game, and I just don't know if Valve - the company - was ready to undertake what this needed to be successful.