Resting Ousmane Dembélé and Nuno Mendes against Le Mans is smart. It's also the clearest sign yet that Ligue 1 has stopped being a competition PSG actually has to fear. Both things are true at once, and you can hold them in your head at the same time.
Luis Enrique is sitting his Ballon d'Or winner and his left-back for a league fixture, with Manchester City waiting in the Champions League. That's textbook modern management. Players come back from national-team duty worn down, and a coach who protects his best players ahead of the biggest game on the horizon is doing his job. If you've spent the last few years shouting about player welfare and fixture overload, you don't get to discover outrage the moment a club does the obvious thing. You asked for this.
The reason PSG can do it so casually is that Ligue 1 doesn't make them pay for it. A coach at a club in a real title race can't sit his two best available players for a mid-table opponent and shrug it off. He'd be risking points he can't afford. Luis Enrique isn't risking anything, because PSG expect to beat Le Mans with whoever he puts out there. That says more about the league around him than it does about his squad depth.
This is the same club that won the Champions League in back-to-back seasons, hammering Inter Milan 5-0 in one final and beating Arsenal on penalties in the next. A side built for that level doesn't need Ligue 1 the way Ligue 1 needs it. The domestic calendar has become the warm-up track. The real season, for this group, starts when the European music plays.
The anger people are reaching for is aimed at the wrong target. PSG resting tired players is rational. Any club with the same resources and the same gap to its rivals would do the same thing. Almost no other club in Europe has that gap in its own league, though. In England, Spain, Germany and Italy, benching your Ballon d'Or winner for a league game is a gamble. In France it's a scheduling note.
This is a club acting exactly as its circumstances allow, in a league that lets it treat the domestic grind as preparation for the one trophy it actually cares about. Blame the competition for letting this happen without consequence. The team is just smart enough to take advantage.
