The Qualifying Offer is a weird bit of baseball quasi-arcana. When it first came into being over a decade ago, it was fairly punitive. The players didn’t like it, and the teams likely to sign free agents didn’t like it much either. It became less punitive in the next CBA, and has largely stayed that way since. It’s still a penalty for a signing team, but not as big of one, and the team losing the player gets something, but not anything gigantic as compensation.
Both sides of the labor negotiation have generally proposed doing away with the system.