To those using WoW as an example, bear in mind that we're never really in any scenes and typically not in the spotlight, and those who start anew will often find events in a complete jumble, so time isn't much better there. If anything, it's worse. Vol'jin is still casually standing inside my WoD Garrison, yet he died an expansion ago and was replaced by Sylvanas, yet I can also go and start MoP content when I like and the first cutscene will be of Garrosh as Warchief telling you what to do. There's a LOT of examples of this sort of conflict due to how WoW is pieced together in the present after the levelling system was streamlined and scaled.

An old-school player playing from vanilla would have went from Vanilla > Burning Crusade > Wrath > Cataclysm > Mists > Draenor > Legion > BFA, and we'd be right to consider this the natural course of events, yet if I started levelling a new toon right now, that order is pretty irrelevant outside of my own level. Once you hit X, Y or Z level you can completely skip content entirely and do, say, Wrath rather than Crusade, Draenor instead of Mists etc, and if you do either with any sort of previous story conflict (like above mentioned Vol'Jin/Sylvanas Warchief debacle) then you're in for a lore-based headache if you care for that sort of thing.

Meanwhile, FFXIV has some minor examples of the same thing, but far, far, far less so and none of which exists is too overly impactful unless you're a stinger for accurate lore. Example, I had gotten about halfway through Heavensward on my WHM before I decided to off-level a Dragoon, which caused some... Curiosities in terms of Estinien's place in the MSQ vs how he was in the DRG quest-line. While we can debate over its usefulness, just having the game be more centric from its own A to B and be time-contained is just a way of trying to protect the game, even if it itself also isn't exactly perfect.