I've experienced dungeons in a plethora of MMORPGs now and I can safely say that whenever people claim dungeons were "harder and more interesting" in the past, they're talking pure nostalgia. This happens in literally every single MMORPG that exists for a longer period of time. I've played WoW for 17 years, and dungeons were never hard, but I do look back fondly on playing them in the original vanilla and TBC because I was bad and thus found challenge in that which wasn't challenging. In comes classic and it proved that they weren't actually hard whatsoever.

Same goes for FF14. I've done every dungeon in the game scaled down throughout playing and I can safely say I see nothing in the older dungeon design that would've ever made them complex. Unique, sure, but often in an annoying way past the first time, such as having to click excessive amounts of objects to proceed. Matoya's Relict is getting on my nerves as well. They also had branching paths (99% of the time leading into dead ends with side story pages on the ground or a treasure chest), but that's wasted effort that only a handful of players would willingly go to.

I see a lot of people wanting difficult dungeons, but no timers to avoid the "toxicity WoW has". Here's the issue: especially in FF14, with how streamlined mobility and healing/tanking is, dungeons are practically impossible to make challenging without one. The timer doesn't have to be on the dungeon itself, of course; it can just be an enrage timer on a boss akin to Savage raiding, however that would still trivialize the rest of the dungeon as the only complex aspect is that one boss. If you can kill a boss by pressing a button every 20 seconds and spending the rest of the time dodging mechanics, then making them challenging is almost impossible because you can invest your full attention on executing mechanics. The whole point of a timer is to ensure you're still playing your role correctly while doing the mechanics. The combination of the two is the challenging part, since both in absence of one another are a joke to execute in FF14.