How to keep players engaged on the last day of the season?

GGG, hello! I am one of your players and have played every season of Path of Exile 2. I have noticed the following issue:
At the start of each season, the game enjoys high popularity, but around one month into the season, many players leave, and currency values plummet accordingly. The endgame lacks core gameplay. I have an idea: gather all the bosses in the game into a dungeon, similar to Diablo 3’s rifts, for endless challenges. Each time you defeat a boss, the next boss’s attack and defense increase by 5%. Through this competition, the top 50% of participating players would receive rewards, with the minimum reward being a chest. Higher rankings would grant more chests, which could contain time-limited skins and permanent skins (including skins for weapons, equipment, and skill effects). Three time-limited skins combined with Divine Orbs could be synthesized into a random permanent skin, while three skins plus some Divine Orbs could be randomly synthesized into a new skin.

Pets are the core element that keeps players engaged long-term. This rift could be reset and re-ranked every two weeks. From the chests given out each time, players could obtain a total of five (Pet A). Over one season, there would be six rift events, with the second rift similarly offering five (Pet B), and so on. These pets would be tradable. When a player collects all six types of pets (A, B, C, D, E, F), they could contact you to exchange them for cash rewards. After you fulfill the reward, the pets would be removed from the player’s account. If not exchanged for cash, the pets would remain with the player as keepsakes and could serve as symbols of honor in future seasons. The sixth rift ranking of each season should occur in the final days of the season, ensuring that many players remain active until the season ends.

Participating in rift challenges would require consuming Divine Orbs, so the drop rate of Divine Orbs in the game could be increased. This would give players a sense of joy in the short term.

While your suggestions for the types of rewards are god awful and will never happen, I agree that any ARPG that wants to keep players engaged throughout the season needs some kind of infinitely scaling challenge with a public leader board. While Jonathan has publicly stated that he is not concerned with player retention during the season, only whether they come back for the next season, it seems so low effort to just use existing assets to build some kind of infinitely scaling challenge.