I thought the NPC escort quest was kind of neat when I first got one.

By the end of Endwalker MSQ, I will admit that every time someone said we should go to a destination, I wanted to inwardly scream -- or breathe a sigh of relief if they then walked off on their own and faded away in the old manner.

Admittedly, this is because I was doing MSQ at launch, so anything -- accidentally ending up in water deep enough to swim, getting on a mount reflexively, using an aethernet shard, whatever -- would make you lose the NPC and have to go aaaaaaall the way back to the beginning and get them again. The changes make the system considerably less annoying.

(On the other hand, if when a certain grumpy NPC accompanies you to search for another NPC at a pivotal moment in the next-to-last zone, and specifically demands you not drag him through the water by a waterfall... his reaction if you do in fact cut across the water and then talk to him -- despite there being no glowy box there to trigger a different dialogue -- is priceless, and almost enough to justify all the annoyances of the system at launch.)