I don't see how ranger leads to defensive games, killing a unit without swapping places with it is not that important on your side of the field as you can very easily have squares defended by multiple units, ranger is far more useful to attack enemy lines and ignore enemy defenses imo. I used it in my original lineup to clear lines for rooks, and in my current lineup mostly as anti rps to pick off a couple specific targets before trading it off. I haven't seen anyone just drop a ranger as defense, there should be many more pieces that perform far better as defense.

That said, I do see why it could be annoying to play against. My old pawn/rook army died to fire elemental enough times for me to dislike the piece and ranger isnt all that different. But I don't believe it is in any way sensical to arbitrarily remove destroy from the meta because the game has already evolved in this way: destroy does in fact have so many counters that basing an entire army around it is likely unviable in competitive play, while destroy also is one of the few things potentially keeping lots of low cost minion spam armies in check. If you're running expensive minions, there's nothing that can trade for 2 axemen+0 that keep marching up the board. Even if you do have cheap minions that can trade for this they could easily not be on the correct side of the board to deal with this. Destroy is very rps based, but the solution to rps isnt to remove the scissors. Armies have to be able to counter every possible army they might encounter (not even bringing up inferno or hell mode here, which destroy also keeps in check). If destroy is no longer a possible army people might encounter the effects on the meta could be wildly unpredictable.

TLDR its too late to just nerf destroy out of the game, destroy stabilizes the current meta whether you like it or not and if it were to be nerfed to oblivion there could be large consequences to the meta afterwards. For example, without ranger, any army that does not run super cheap champions would be practically incapable of dislodging a lilith wedged in the center of the board, which would only lead to more defense and not less of it