This is a feature intended for healthy competition in for instance speedruns or when there's a community competition to do some sort of challenge run. With it enabled, everyone should be on equal fooring. The simplest implementation would probably be a checkbox somewhere on the mission select screen to disable all uvs on all gear, which would put you on equal footing with anyone who does the same and uses the same gear.

When this is enabled, some indicating hud element would show near the minimap, possibly next to an icon that mentions the current difficulty. This would would make the setting quickly identifiable in video footage for the challenge run.

If implemented, it might be interesting to experiment with enabling it in pvp, either for a short event or an optional mode, but that's not a race I have a horse in at all.