SAM is indeed dead and the games almost completely to the point of being fully homogenized to the point where everything's the same.

From all the forum posts and feedback it's clear there's two camps of people in this:
1) Those that hate the changes because it negatively impacts their enjoyment of the job to the point of dropping it all together (or the game like myself)
and
2) Those that don't mind the changes but were still playing and enjoying the job before the changes

In other words, if SAM was reverted to how it was in 6.08, the people in camp 2 would still play it.

It's been said before but I'll echo the sentiments again: this is surprisingly similar to what WoW did many years ago; they removed all the core identities of their classes and people got bored and jumped from class to class till eventually many players couldn't find something they enjoyed.

It's extra frustrating as the devs worked so hard to salvage XIV with ARR and worked so hard over so many years getting the game back to a really good place; but then they just drop the ball and get in the way of their own success.

From baffling gameplay changes, to homogenizing jobs, to reducing the amount of content we get per-patch, to increasing the wait time between patches, to not having enough server capacity for the thousands upon thousands upon thousands of new players that just want to try the damn game, to rushing the conclusion of the main story arc . . . it just all around feels like everything is going downhill.