Mods and cheat engine

[Grebeny]

Xeno clear Ultimate long before any of these programs even work, yes?

Bagel got banned for using telegraphs for boss attacks that were not suppose to be there. Way before Xeno cleared, Bagel group was world first in prog and all others were watching mechanics from his stream. So some of the tools already work on day one. The streamer from japan and the World first youtuber had addon showing them when they can start moving during cast and addon to see numbers they are not suppose in party list.

They used a UI plugin which put abilities timers on the party list, something Yoshida has even said they're considering doing themselves.

Yoshida never said such a thing. What was written in his note is that they will look at the third party tools used by community and evaluate what they may add to discourage usage of those tools. This specific addon was not mentioned in any way by his statement, they never stated they may add those numbers to the party list or they will implement any of the mods, the streamers were banned for. For example they added new sounds on specific mechanics to discourage players from using auto call bots, did they added auto call bots when they wanted to discourage players from using them?

Tdevs have never added "traps" or done anything of the sort.

Fast example. They implemented code to catch up on people that fake not being afk by using forward, backward macro on their keyboard when servers were overwhelming and nobody wanted to be DCed for AFK. The "dungeon bots" are almost extinct species, and if you played during HS or SB you would know what I am talking about. For crafting they need to press one button on a simple macro that maybe makes it too complicated, or we don't complain about it enough to make them take actions.

Banning third party programs like mods, ACT and the like isn't cost efficient for SE. They will lose a sizable amount of money while gaining absolutely nothing for it.

This mods are not allowed in first place, to be banned. In the last two days we saw around 7 really toxic communications both ingame and in discord related to ACT/FFlogs. You may not see it personally, but people get frustrated and stop playing the game because of it. For huge portion of the players, the selling point for this game was there is none or at least is reduced to an absolute minimum of this behavior. For sure SE already are losing money because people see the same bevaior they ran away from. BTW go back to first streams of Asmongold, even for him that was a one of the big selling points of FF XIV.
Just imagine if the NSFW mods generate a pedo scandal, as George Cacioppo knows pretty well, Sony have zero tollerance for it and may remove the entire FF from their platform. No money lost at all.