Their team has grown a lot over the years though. Obviously they have been hiring and training people. They have said at this point they have a lot of people working for them that were just players of the game beforehand, which is natural not only for a franchise that has gone on this long but especially for a live service game that has gone on this long.

I remember reading that most of the FF16 team actually disbanded, probably before it even released, since the game was finished. They only had a small amount of people remaining for the patch content, so most likely the rest of them would need new projects. They were even close enough to finishing that the original release date for FF16 was much earlier until covid interfered, so they may have had an abundance of people looking for a new project even earlier than that.