To me the gold standard of questing has always been Guild Wars 2. The game gives you many options to gain experience: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Exp...ing_experience
-Main story quests
-Completing hearts, which are essentially areas where you can perform several different tasks to "fill up" the heart for experience. So if bandits were attacking a farm you could say kill bandits, put out fires with water, capture escaped livestock, or rescue farmers. Completion rewards currency and XP.
-Vistas: Where there is a point on the map you need to puzzle out a path to with climbing and pathing. You're rewarded with a cinematic vista and XP.
-Waypoints (reaching fast travel points) / Points of interest (reaching specific points on the map)
-Hero challenges (a climbing puzzle, boss, or event that rewards a skill point).
-Gathering nodes.
-Dynamic events, which are like what FATEs should be. Varied objectives that often create branching paths for a zone's story. So for example if you fight off the centaur invasion you might help the farmers rebuild, or if the centaurs are not driven off in time you might lead a revenge strike on their leader. Later on these turn into complex campaigns that involve zone-wide coordinate and culminate in boss battles and impressive loot.
-Adventures, where you are given some sort of challenge with Bronze, Silver, and Gold tiers. It might be an obstacle course with a timer, defusing X mines in a minute, or surviving Y waves in an arena.

FFXIV has the worst questing I've seen in any MMO. The MSQ quests are 90% just watching cutscenes, and it's clear that the developers love movie content and only stick a few gameplay crumbs in to technically make it a game. I dread the MSQ, because it's less interactive than a game and disjointed compared to a movie due to all of the traveling to point X. The open world is just a bland canvas to sprinkle a few fates on and to spawn quest characters on.