will construction ever be relevant?

It literally HAS TO CHANGE if they expect that new Continent to even moderately Function as having any sort of "Meta" with 400 players all on it clustering towards eachother.

Nope.

1) This game wasn't designed with it in mind. It was shoe-horned in years later.
2) Bases are able to be built in some ridiculous places, so it's exploited. The vehicles you need to attack a base can't get to them, or find themselves in terrain that leaves them ineffective and vulnerable, which is not fun.
3) Instead of making constructed bases fun to fight at, devs instead implement things like dome shields and pain fields to inflict damage-over-time on attacking infantry. Which is again, not fun.
4) Because of the above, most players just avoid "$##tt#r villages". I know I do. So if the devs ever come up with some scheme to make them "relevant" enough to force players to interact with them, it'd probably drive many of them off. It would me.

This game is old, and getting older. Devs concern themselves with trivial things. They've compressed the skill gap by changing damage drop-off on weapons originally meant for ranged combat, and allowing shotguns to remain effective at too long a range. Not to mention adding shotgun secondaries. They ignore game and server performance issues, never improving them. And they use the money players spend on this game to hack yet another battle royal game from PS2 engine and assets. As if it were going to pull players from Fortnight and Apex Legends. I'm sure true battle royale fans are going to leave those optimized and polished games with better performance and netcodes that were designed from the start to be battle royale games to play PS2: Arena.

Sorry. Just not seeing it.