Starcraft 2 is a great example for deconstructing this design philosophy (while ironically Starcraft 1 is a great example of the complete opposite), Blizzard have intentionally and constantly changed the balance of the game and create new imbalances so the meta would evolve and be fluid by forcing players to adapt, change, and find the imbalances and find ways to deal with them.
The art of most video games is not to create perfect balance but to create multiple subtle imbalances that can be discovered and overcome this in effect what creates the meta of the game and without a living meta games often can become stale and boring.
Making a mathematically balanced game is easy, making an imbalanced game that is still interesting is an art form.
This is what sets a few games apart from the rest, games like LoL and Starcraft are a great example of the "imbalanced by design" distilled to an art form.
Hearthstone is also imbalanced by design to both create a fluid meta, as well as to push the progression both the in-game progression and the out of game monetization progression.
That is absolute rot. A simple balanced game. A perfectly balanced complex game with thousands of combinations of disparate variables is incredibly hard - because actually ranking what equality means is in and of itself an incredibly hard problem when abilities are significantly different.
Blizzard approached this problem by homogenization at one point and recognised this is a terrible solution. They now attempt to balance within a structure of variety - largely by responding to the evolution of the meta as players learn new ways to min/max