Mmm. I, for one, am very much over peoples' obsession with endgame. MMOs, to me, are about the world and the people in it. There's more to that with finding a group for a dungeon in an old-school way, or in world PvP, than creating a static group of 8/15/whatever hand picked people who are just like you to see a number go up to simulate what's effectively, at that point, just a sports team.

But I think forced grouping content kind of died out over time because it's nearly impossible for developers to manage it in a way that's healthy for their playerbase, there are too many bad incentives. It worked back when MMOs were relatively niche, streamers weren't much of a thing, and people were incentivized to learn the game with others at a pace that was sane. And in large part, these things happened specifically not at endgame. Endgame is often where the MMO goes to die.

So I'm not really surprised with devs moving to soloification and disentangling reliance. Especially when people are increasingly audibly angry at players that they perceive to be insufficiently skilled.

In-game, at least, on my server, everyone seems quite happy with the available content, including some people who have terrifying amounts of gametime.