What happens when Little Citizen Joe legitimately sues a huge company with lots of legal resources resulting in Citizen Joe getting out-lawyered? Is he burdened with the massive cost of that? Surely the company could drop XXXk in legal bills on him
Every mechanism has a means to game it.
Similar system works where I live: there’s a well defined attorney hourly fee, which is what is used to calculate the reimbursement of attorney’s fees of the winning party. If you hired better lawyer, you still have to pay the difference from your pocket. Presumably the idea is to limit abusively large fees.
It's also worth noting that the UK is lowering the amount of fees you can get back. There's an upper limit on the percentage of fees you can get paid by the other side. This is essentially to introduce a higher cost to litigation through the courts and encourage sides to settle or go through an arbitration process.