World of Warcraft died because the developers only catered to casuals and world prog

[Chasingstars]

WoW didn't die from being made more casual, as from day 0 it was designed as a streamlined and more casual version of existing mmorpgs at the time. Some of its lightning-in-a-bottle success in the early days such as questing, was originally due to "a navigation error in which players would accidentally wander into higher level zones".

It was more negatively affected by the amount of grindy and timegated aspects put in it. That made even their own version of the Palace of the Dead known as Torghast be known as 'Choreghast'. People may bemoan PotD and find it boring, but its never been mandatory for your endgame raids and trials.

There was also of how the devs didn't seem to really care about listening to the players, especially for shadowlands when they said they were listening but stubbornly still thought certain things would go fine with the players despite their protests.

Or of how many temporary systems would get added/adjusted/removed to act as a sort of treadmill for players. Like can you imagine getting Blade's Justice for drk from Bozja during shadowbringers, and then that same relic you obtained can no longer be obtained when endwalker launched?

[Ronduwil]

It was more negatively affected by the amount of grindy and timegated aspects put in it. That made even their own version of the Palace of the Dead known as Torghast be known as 'Choreghast'. People may bemoan PotD and find it boring, but its never been mandatory for your endgame raids and trials.

I completely agree with you, and I'd like to add that while Torghast resembles palace of the dead, it also has the following characteristics that make it absolutely awful:

• Gear is not normalized, when casual players complained it was too hard, the developers sheepishly admitted that they'd tuned it against M+/Heroic raid gear and then nerfed it into the ground, pissing off the M+/raiding crowd who already found it lacking the challenge that they craved. In the end, no one was happy.
• The rewards are lackluster. It doesn't drop anything except for the soul ash that everyone is there to grind and additional companions for your mission tables (like getting additional NPCs for your Grand Company squadrons).
• It's filled with trash mobs upon trash mobs upon trash mobs that (at best) provide temporary buffs for the rest of your run. There is no persistent power gain.