People that say dungeons are too easy...

[Shurrikhan]

This is partly true. But WoW dungeons from vanilla and TBC required CC, strategy good group composition and tanks would only pull a pack at a time. Sometimes you would even have to pull strategically or risk aggroing another pack which would result in a wipe.

And classic dungeons like Blackrock Depths and Maraudon could take hours to complete fully.

Wrath of the Lich King is what started the YOLO pull everything, with dungeons being super easy, barely an inconvenience. Players, similar to what is happening now in this community, began complaining that dungeons were way too easy. So Blizzard responded in the next expansion Cataclysm, by making dungeons a lot more challenging.

Everyone hated it.

So, they went back to the YOLO pull snoozefest and that's where they've been ever since. If you want a greater challenge, you have to run mythics. Maybe players here want something similar. I will say this may be a case of forum posters not being what the majority of the playerbase actually wants.

The comparison made was between current XIV and current WoW, which reached its difficulty levels beyond Heroic more than a decade ago and has had M+ for over 7 years.

And many still consider Cataclysm to be the best period Normal/Heroic dungeons ever had. Dislike for any difficulty in dungeons was far from unanimous.

Wild times, set up CC on 5/6 targets in a trash pull or prepare to wipe lmao

Unless you were running a Survival Hunter and/or there was the perfect mixture of mobs for your composition, hard CCing at least as many enemies as you have party members wasn't even possible. Nor was that amount of pre-fight hard CC (unless you mean something else by "set up") necessary unless the whole party was significantly underskilled and/or undergeared.

CC was essential, yes, but not to that point. Smart interrupts (DK had ~4 at the time by itself, and some other specs came close to that) and just 1-2 hard CCs on the most annoying but isolateable mobs was enough for decently geared and skilled parties and made dungeons far faster than sacrificing all AoE damage.

Cataclysm dungeons were a terror only for those equivalent to Ice Mages, won't damage-even-in-downtime healers, or those without utilities even on hotbars. For most randomly matched players, they caused some wipes, and not every party was guaranteed a clear without their knowing/learning at least parts of their spec and fights'/mobs' mechanics, but they were plenty manageable.