Honestly, I did a speed read of the posts just to check if what was stated is the same thing that has appeared between multiple other posts involving FFXIV and basically, it is. They sort of got into this thing during Shadowbringers Era where the game became increasingly focused on very specific activities while taking resources and effort away in other activities that would educate or show the true value of these other activities. The game also ended up becoming a bit more fractured in terms of community ever since Shadowbringers as they put more focus on savage and ultimate, as those activities proved to retain players better than other less hardcore activities. In a nutshell, they want to turn as many casual players as possible into raiders to retain player pops.

In real life, we don't expect to play the same game forever and intend there to be an end. A service game having a massive player drop is bad if a company has to depend on that service game to survive.