I think the biggest contributor to the issue is dungeon roulettes being made to be the main way of leveling up or gaining currency for gear.

Back in ARR, alliance raids and dungeons initially had more going on for them and a variety of different mechanics. Leveling was done with FATE parties since it was faster and less a drag on your sanity than some of the dungeons, especially Aurum Vale and Dzaemel Darkhold. Labyrinth of the Ancients and some of the dungeons people think "fondly" of as being hard were never difficult for their own sake, but the difficulty came mostly from other players not paying attention or doing the content badly. Even stuff like Orbonne can be done with half your brain concentrating on something else, but the difficulty is making sure that everyone knows what to do and doesn't screw it up for everyone else.

A push to enforcing roulettes as the main source of daily content meant players needing to spam the same content repeatedly every day for multiple patches, which can be a drag on everyone's sanity if it's going to end up with players deciding to leave duty because it's the "longer dungeon" or the one they just plain hate the mechanics of. So everything gets smoothed over because like it or not, ultimately all that stuff just ends up being a daily grind on the rail of getting people equipped for raids.

It would be nice to see the dev team go back to that wild west where they didn't know which content would stick and we had dungeons that were more "interesting" and guildhests and stuff like that but I don't know if we will.