Yeah, exactly! Eternal PvE content to keep people busy with and have somewhere to use their free tickets. The unique rewards are a bit of fun that people can go for by refilling tickets if they want to.
I benefitted most because I grinded hundreds of ingredients with those free tickets in the years before MBQ and have never needed to farm ingredients ever since, so all my excess tickets go on MBQ and earn me gems.
I did a full breakdown of monthly free gems and calculated MBQ as roughly 30 gems a month for people who participate in it.