Things are getting worse.

[CKNovel]

Just seems like everything is falling apart.

Housing.
PVP.
Class design.
Cosmetics/Customizations.

Housing improved. While of course you can't deny that FC and alts can still claim a whole ward, that the house supply will never reach the demand (You would need 1 house per player, simply impossible), Housing has improved.

PvP has improved.
Before it was PvE design with additionnal actions and special gear. No one played it.
Then it was simplified jobs, no one played it either.
Finally they designed PvP that goes wild with job design and has an actual fun mode, also fixed the rewards.

PvP went from dead to popular. You can't deny it improved.

Class design has improved.
I'm sorry but a few examples:
Back in HW, BRD/MCH had to sacrificed their DPS in order to restore MP/TP, which was often due to a team member mistake.
PLD was boring and having too much sks would mean running out of TP. Blood for blood existed and you would die because of it.
SMN was a mess and nothing like a SMN at all. I do think 6.0 SMN is a joke but the rework was needed.
Healers were actually worse before, they had less oGCD and would more often rely on casts.
SB MCH.

There are many examples about how crappy job design was before EW.
Sure they are doing mistakes such as Kaiten, SMN rework, MCH being left to rot.
But they also made massive improvements such as PLD, DRK, SCH, DRG, RDM, MNK.
Let's not forget great job from their introduction, GNB and RPR.

Cosmetics haven't changed, they never changed and I don't see why you're pointing this out.
The only way they would make a jump would be to add the glamour library but they stated it wasn't possible as of now.
If anything, we got a bunch of QoLs with removal of many glamour prisms, the glamour wardrobe and glamour plate.

I have seen someone pointing the story and I will agree with them. In my opinion, EW was good in the middle but the start and finish were greatly missed to me.
McGuffing for the sake of fanservices and last time introductions aren't great. I understand it was very difficult to reiterate the Shadowbringers story but there was just too many shortcuts taken in Endwalker.