Archipel Naoki Yoshida Interview

[Genz]

Executives nowadays, if someone were to attempt to make an MMORPG,
they would probably advise to make something like Fortnite instead.

FFXIV, being focused on small scale and short duration content, is already far closer to Fortnite and other multiplayers games than older MMO.
And that's why executives would logically avoid "MMORPG" now : because of the success of FFXIV, following WoW template, the expectations around the MMO genre have been cemented into "high quantity of short (and often low quality) content", which isn't very impressive to players but is very expensive to produce.