I think what you're seeing is a symptom of a few things, both a bit SE's fault and nothing to do with SE.

1. Lack of actual long term, goal driven content. We've had the same rinse and repeat tome farm and DDR battles since 2.0. Now everyone just sits in town and glamours up. There's a lot of validity in the common joke about glamour being FFXIV's endgame. And its not healthy for an MMO. A lot of what you're seeing with the RP nonsense is just very bored people with nothing to do but look pretty.

2. There is little to no actual social ramifications on a community level for being well... an idiot. Instances, server chats and multi world is great for a lot of reasons, but the big downside is no one knows who you are in the giant sea of constantly different people. In other MMO's, if you acted the fool, people would quickly remember your name and soon you'll find yourself missing content because no one would team up with you. That truth helped regulate player behavior far more then GM's or devs ever could.

It's not that different then real life in some ways. When you give everyone everything and little drive to do anything else... added with the fun mix of not having to face repercussions for much... humanity tends to get pretty weird.