I was almost in the mood to play FF14 again

[Deo14]

Oh? What is 'freestyle' play? I didn't see this in any of the lv90 guides, but perhaps is just nomenclature.

We used to have only single stack of Tsubame and Meikyo, which made it harder to align everyrthing, and also because you got buffs only from 2nd parts of Kasha/Gekko combos, simply said, rotation used to be much more strict in the past. Nowadays, you just need to remember few things to do and their priority and you can just wing it/freestyle it. This might be shocking, but SAM was often considered hard, some people went as far as comparing it to BLM. Which is huge contrast to today's "anything goes" SAM.

Freestyle samurai seems to originate from one singular person, then it got memed on and the legend of freestyle samurai started. It's very hyperbolical example of someone who was really just mashing his button as he wanted, but difficulty of playing SAM has definitely lowered significantly since that time, so we are getting closer and closer to the legendary freestyle samurai. Long story short, my comment was just a hyperbole.