Do encounteres (specifically Extremes) FEEL different now?

[Jeeqbit]

The developers have explained their logic with making extremes before. They just try to make them different. To give you an example, they said they made Titania a party-responsibility fight and Innocence a personal-responsibility fight to differentiate them. Obviously, they are also fitting the mechanics to the lore as well and lore can be a pretty good inspiration for mechanic ideas.

Go back and play through the SB Extremes. They largely feel more technical, methodical.

Through Heavensward, they did start moving away from bosses not casting things like tank busters. If you look at Shiva's stance changes and compare them to EX2, you see how the switch is far more obvious and the mechanics related to it properly cast. Bosses also stopped auto-attacking as much as they began structuring the fights instead of just having them do conal aoes and things like that. But again, not everyone could knockback immune, mitigate, self-heal or gap close then, so these basic attacks were harder to handle.

Through Stormblood, the fights were pretty structured and we had more tools to deal with simpler mechanics including more heals and KB immunity. Then in Shadowbringers absolutely all melee jobs had gap closers too so they could let the bosses jump around a lot more. Then in Endwalker the bosses don't necessarily jump around so much because their hitbox is too big! Tanks can also just fill in for healers sometimes at this point.

What should also be noted is how some rotations have got simpler. In Stormblood we got job gauges so we don't track buffs so much, then Shadowbringers into Endwalker began making them less distracting, which allows for the fights themselves to be more distracting and faster-paced. Unfortunate for some jobs that didn't change a lot, like BLM!

They might also just try to give each expansion a new style. In Shadowbringers they started doing the "left, then right" type mechanic a lot where in previous expansion you just dodged once, whereas I haven't seen it much in this expansion. They also made them faster-paced in Shadowbringers.