It's kind of too late to put the genie back in the bottle, though.
Where there is one event that has become synonymous with the sport, that event holds sway. The people that you need to convince aren't the types posting on a cycling board because we're the ones already watching the whole package and the smaller races. It's the type of people who watch once a year, in July, and need a refresher course about suitcases of courage and little petrol engines and big diesel engines every season. The audience for Le Tour is so much bigger than the rest of the calendar that being on the startlist there is crucial to the outreach for sponsors, hence why One Cycling needs the Saudi sportswashing money, because the commercial sponsors will still want the eyes on their product provided by Le Tour.
Just as the World Rally-Raid Championships are run by FIA and FIM, but in conjunction with ASO as they had to homologate regulations with those at the ASO-run Dakar Rally, because that's the one Rally Raid event people outside of its own tiny niche are aware of and pay attention to.
Similarly, FIA's GT series died the death because their regulations diverged from ACO, who organise the 24h du Mans. Nobody wanted to run expensive GT1 or GT2 cars if they couldn't go to Le Mans, the one time a year that sportscars get global coverage. The current WEC again is organised specifically by ACO with FIA sanctioning as a result of extensive work to agree regulations because nobody wanted to run sportscars outside of the budget GT3 class unless they were able to get the coverage that Le Mans provides. Winning Le Mans is still far more prestigious than winning WEC anyway.
And, as mentioned before a few times, the best example is the AOWR split, with Indycar winning despite having worse cars, worse drivers, lower budget teams and less international coverage than Champ Car. Because Indycar had the Indy 500 and so much of the audience of casuals that only watched AOWR once a season did so because the Indy 500 has name value far above and beyond the rest of the sport.
If an ongoing cycling series with a world ranking was really going to succeed, you'd have thought there would have been more efforts by big stars to protect leads in the World Cup ranking, or the ProTour, or the World Tour. There have been many attempts to set up a world calendar in a way so that the Tour becomes a focal point more like, say, the Holmenkollen 50, or the Monaco Grand Prix, rather than the Indy 500 or the Le Mans 24 Hours. Instead, although the World Cup did have a brief run of relevance, by and large teams ignore these and compete toward their own goals, with the eventual World Tour ranking being a kind of guide as to who did best at year end rather than anything that teams and riders actually contest.
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