Yoshida's latest interview, Comic Exhibition Taiwan 2025

[Jeeqbit]

act like everything before Dawntrail essentially doesn’t matter.

If that was the case, prior MSQ wouldn't be required.

Instead of expanding the story meaningfully, they recycle plotlines from other Final Fantasy games

It's always been intended to be a final fantasy themepark ie. a coming together of the different final fantasy games with multiplayer features. That's how they've seen it since the relaunch in 2.0. They reused lots of things from the start such as ifrit, titan, garuda, black mage, chocobos, shiva, ff11 mobs, cid, bahamut, gold saucer (ff7), ivalice (ff12), absolute virtue (ff11), weapons from ff7, Quezacotl from ff8, eden (ff8), archfiends (ff4), magus sisters (ff4/ff10), lots of FF9 stuff in DT, ff11 alliance raids.

They do this because everyone's definition of final fantasy is different depending on which ones they've played. So by making it have elements of all of them, all final fantasy players will find something familiar.

reuse old assets

Standard and expected for a game developer to make maximum use of models they put lots of work into. I would too if I was developing a game, unless I decided to use AI, but players would be very upset if they were using that so reusing will have to do.