RoboCup was founded almost 23 years ago. While the physical robot leagues often garner most attention, there has always existed a simulation league, of both 2d and 3d varieties. https://ssim.robocup.org/
This new Google competition appears to be more about ML and playing the game, judging from videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8DcgFDT9sc
The Google simulator lets you learn from pixels if you want to, but the agent that you're controlling only has 8 actions [1] available to it, so the learning problem here really has no bearing on a robotics application or anything in the real world that I can think of.
The humanoid robot leagues are constrained by cost - several of the simulated leagues, including the one shown in your video, have a corresponding physical league. And the physical league needs two teams of NAO robots, which cost ~$8000 each, and there are 11 on each team. So you're looking at $176,000 of student project for the physical league. You've correctly identified they don't work very well - but more agile robot hardware would cost even more. I've never seen two atlas robots together, let alone 22!