For what it's worth, Shadowbringers is when the quality on a lot of small-detail type stuff dropped massively. Also when they started doing a single dungeon per patch instead of giving us any non-MSQ dungeons.

All this was before COVID too, before someone uses it as an excuse.

Like, yeah, the MSQ was good and it's still my favorite expansion in terms of storytelling, but it had a lot of issues outside of that. It's when it became obvious FFXVI was taking resources from FFXIV to me.