FFXIV did not win any awards at the 2023 Video Game Awards

[Absurdity]

The story was very easily formulaic and predicatble like 80% of the time and really the only big moment people get so googly eyed over is just that like 20% between Defeating Vauthry, Crystal Exarch getting exposed and Emet Selch popping a cap while inviting you to his crib thats off the hook down in the deep blue sea.

Don't forget the first time you see Rapture...I mean Amaurot.

Or maybe just for those who associate "Shadowbringers" with (and liked) "the story told during patches 5.0 to 5.55" and not the details of job design during that era?

I don't think that much about job design anyway, but when I do, it's more like a separate thread of game evolution that might have happened alongside Shdowbringers MSQ but that doesn't make it part of what Shadowbringers actually is, especially in the context of saying that Shadowbringers was a good expansion. I will assume they are talking about the story experience, not how jobs played at the time.

It's kinda hard to disconnect the actual gameplay from the overall expansion quality when it's like 90% of what you do. The story takes up very little time spent with the game, unless that's literally all you do before unsubscribing.
The job design has a massive impact on most of the activities outside of watching cutscenes and reading dialogue.

It's why I do not understand why CBU3 puts so little focus on good gameplay. It's an MMORPG (even if people sometimes try to claim otherwise), so when I spend 95% of my time in the game running the same activities, because the game expects me to, and doing so is not particularly engaging then the experience suffers heavily overall, doesn't matter how good the 5% of story are.