Difficulty does not mean "bad," and easy does not mean "good." The opposite is also true. Whether something is challenging or easy does not directly correlate with how fun something is because what makes a game entertaining is built on a multitude of other factors. Animal Crossing is a widely successful and fun game, and it's also very easy and relaxing. A piece of that equation, though, is also subjective. Different people find different things fun, and that's why older job design was well-liked and successful.

Not all FFXIV content contains a lot of difficulty. Most of it requires very little from the player, and that can make for a very dull and monotonous experience for people who have a higher understanding of the game's mechanics and have pursued harder forms of content. But what allowed that content to still be enjoyable before was jobs having more ways to push your performance and master the job. And what was beautiful about that was that added complexity was optional. The game did not demand you play your role to perfection, or even close to it. If pushing your performance on a job wasn't interesting to you, you weren't required to do it. You could still approach your job at a surface level and get through anything the game will throw at you. By removing that added complexity, all that's been done is that optional difficulty that allowed some people to enjoy all content to some level regardless of difficulty to be alienated from the majority of FFXIV's content.