FF14 is not made for hardcore players.

[Nethereal]

Yes, they absolutely do.

I think there's a distinction missing in this particular part of the conversation.

Every game has a draconian ToS it's just not enforced. It's in place so that the companies have absolute power over the players but a majority of companies don't use even a quarter of the rights they have over players it's simply a contingency.

As someone who has played a lot mmorpg games for the past 20 ish years I can say that FFXIV is the most heavily policed game I've seen since I've started playing mmorpgs to date on the market.
The closest thing to it might by LoL's toxic/leaver's queue. No other game is as heavily policed.

You did touch on this on your earlier post but I don't think you really highlighted how big of a difference it actually is relative to other mmorpgs.
As long as it's not racist it's pretty much the wild west in every other game, maybe you get in trouble once every 3 years for something you did 2 years ago after 100 reports.
Now if that's a good or bad thing I can't really say.

I would however say that players do notice how policed a game is and it does create a lean towards a certain personality type as they all congregate to the same place.