What's the point with that quite lackluster story in Endwalker?

[ReynTime]

Eh?

Being quite frank, FFXIV's post-2.0 gameplay (especially combat gameplay) is way more directly involved than most mainline games in the series. If we're arguing that this game caters to people "who don't like learning to play videogames" more than FFXII's Gambit System, the FFXIII series' Auto-Battle system, or FFXV's "Just get close and hold one button" system, I'm gonna have to disagree.

I'm nowhere near a fan of FFXIV's gameplay or progression loops, but I'm seriously curious how one can even come to this conclusion.

Both XII and XIII already have more depth than XIV for the simple fact they actually require you to shift your party configuration, gear, etc, unlike in XIV where party comp only matters for speedruns, all resemblances of skill/trait setups were scrapped years ago, and all aspects of gearing are more homogeneous than the dull job design. On top of that, there is nothing remotely close to paradigm shifts requiring decision making and reacting since combat design is always a dance act that depends entirely on boss dance step prompts, most which have been recycled to death at this point in time.
Furthermore Trusts and Squads are both infinitely more shallow than Gambit even if you strip Gambit off 3/4 of its unlockable conditions and triggers. And even if you master Gambit you're not going to be sitting on an easy setup that will take care of every optional boss fight nor will the setup cover all your bases, that's by design made impossible, which means again, even with XII's own official internal bot mechanic you need to use your head and prepare your AI for specific fights. If you want to argue it doesn't matter for the main story, well, XIV's MSQ's only challenge since all the nerfs and buffs has been to actually not clear something no matter how bad your partners are.
Then there's dungeon design. XII trumps XIV no contest. They're actual dungeons. You might have a case with XIII, which shares XIV's genius level design of focusing on hallways, setpieces and flash over substance. But while XIII is the notorious hallway simulator, XIV literally takes the exact same enemy per boss distribution setup and repeats it every single time. Even XIII has more variety if you're not distracted like a child by all the pretty non-interactable things one has over the other.

I'm not going to argue against XV much, but to say you can beat the entire game just holding a button and pressing another is like saying you only clear job quest duties by wiping on purpose and toggling the very easy mode, or saying Mario 3D World has no challenge because you used the white tanooki suit.