Yes we get relatively useless rewards all the time, but presumably blueprints or Relic drops were useful to someone, somewhere, at some time.
This Rival quest design was a clear mistake by developers: it wasn't possible for 4 attempts to be useful to ANYBODY because the quests that came before this required you to finish GE for the week.
I don't even remember seeing this bad reward pointed out in beta, which should have caught it, but they have the Rivals feedback thread going for over 50 pages and split between the old forums and Discord so yeah - this is more of the low quality design, communication and testing we have come to expect this year.