Spoiler warning below

As someone who's played since closed beta and finds enjoyment in challenge & constantly improving I do believe the game has gotten significantly easier since Stormblood. There are reasons for it and some of these are understandable while others are questionable at best.

I could make sweeping comments about Savage and Extreme being easier than they've ever been but just to highlight some recent examples as a tank Rubicante EX virtually never auto attacks and his puzzles were interesting in blind but after that he's pretty pathetic for an EX with very little damage and while you could certainly argue about his line puzzles most will just follow the group as with many group based puzzle mechanics so in that vein he still has no ground due to a notable lack of personal responsibility.

For Savage any veteran raider will tell you that P7S is such a joke of a fight that it was clearly designed by someone with no sense of pressure or pacing, it's astonishing how bad of a fight this really is and I challenge you to find a veteran raider who thinks P7S is a good fight.

Besides these examples there is also the homogenisation of jobs and burst; the latter of which especially makes skill expression difficult as it makes crit RNG in a 2 min window more important than it's ever been. The post-SHB potency spike furthers this issue. I'm not saying jobs shouldn't be accessible but dammit let us have a real curve for those of us who enjoy a sense of personal growth and mastery.

As for dungeons I just wish they weren't afraid to push the players on occasion. There are some good dungeons out there with good pulls and bosses like Bardam's, Mt Gulg and Hermes in Ktisis and then there's rubbish like the second boss of Alzadaal's. They gave us these ridiculous tools so why aren't we being encouraged to use them?

There will always be lazy, dead weight players but part of the problem is the huge issue that FFXIV does nothing to encourage it's players to improve while it continues to make sweeping simplifications, some of which they hide behind the notion of accessibility. I consider this an insult to all players as it means the devs literally do not trust you to think or improve. Are they wrong though?

FFXIV needs both ends of the spectrum to thrive so a line needs to be drawn somewhere or something will give eventually. At the very least encourage your player base to try and improve but for those who simply can't or are unwilling well that's why we have duty support and echo scaling.

If I had to describe it as a long time player it's like a feedback loop of them making the content more "approachable" with the knock on effect of many players putting in less and less effort which performance numbers reflect thus they double down harder. It just gets worse and people don't get better.

"It doesn't matter how idiot-proof they try to make the game, the game will always produce a better idiot."