I loved the old Blizzard RTSs as a kid. I think it was SC2: Heart of the Swarm when I got a bunch of coworkers to get the game and we played together quite a bit over a month. But it reached a point where I could take them all 4v1 (we only did that once though, I didn't want to scare them off or be a gloating asshole) and win without really breaking a sweat. I learned my build orders and my keyboard shortcuts.

I could not for the life of me break out of bronze in multiplayer.

A couple years later one of my best friends was talking shit about whooping me in SC1, and I destroyed him. But that game gave me some ideas.

I think people really enjoy the base building aspect, like all of my friends treated building bases on some level as being like Sim City.

And back in the SC1 days, battle.net was rife with "No Rush" games where you build yourself up for whatever agreed upon time limit and then go at it. Games would often be labeled as NR15 or NR20, for example.

I think one possible resolution for increasing the popularity of RTS is to take a hybrid real time approach. You can build and do things in real time, but under the hood battles and the economy operate in discrete chunks of at least several seconds. You can do something similar to Sim City where every minute or two or whatever, you get all your resources to spend, and can then spend the rest of the time focusing elsewhere.

You can make a Base Building RTS where No Rush rules are baked into the game.

There is room for RTS games to be chill and more relaxed, as opposed to the game long manic feeling that you can never do anything fast enough, and that I think is the avenue to giving RTSs some mainstream limelight.