The ratios are skewed so badly that women get at least an order of magnitude more likes that men on average, so having the woman at least indicating that they are marginally interested lets you know it's worth spending the effort on making the next move.
If you're an incredibly good looking guy, women will put some effort in, but for ordinary looking guys, the vast majority of women don't even bother to respond with an autoreply "sorry, not interested". They just ignore your message entirely, and there's only so many interesting and well-thought out first moves you can send based on something in someone's profile that you resonated with, only be be completely ignored, before you realise that it's all just an utter waste of time if you're not in that top 10% of guys.
To me, it seems that Bumble doesn't really know what it's lost by changing that behaviour, as it's now become just another Tinder.