OP, for several years of my playtime in this game I was in the same boat as you. I felt insane! I played this game, I loved this game, but I thought I was playing a radically different game to everyone else. While everyone I knew said the game was full of cool, friendly, people and an open and fun community; I only seemed to find people who constantly harassed others, screamed about parsers and optimal strategies even in casual content while the community at large heavily gatekept pretty much anything they could, while simultaneously harassing anyone trying to make progress. It was terrible and led to me quitting the game for a long period of time, coming back; finding nothing had changed, and quitting again when I ran out of story content to do.

And then a good friend of mine started playing and I made a character on their server. And let me tell you; it was night and day. People weren't calling eachother slurs in chat! People were being friendly! People actually did fates out in the wild, and most of the party finders weren't locked and gatekept behind having max item level for even basic things, and I only saw one or two people ever even talk about parsers let alone spend an entire raid or dungeon harassing people for not parsing higher! So when server status changed and free transfers to that server were open, I took the chance, jumped ship and never looked back.

I used to play on Cactuar. You can not pay me to ever go back there. People blame Asmongold for its community, but no dawg. It was awful before, "wow refugees" are just a convenient scapegoat for people being forced to face the fact that their server has a really hostile and caustic attitude and always has.