I always thought it was a mistake and also kind of telling about the devs' change in approach to the game when almost all the ARR dungeons were fundamentally altered to go from a dungeon with multiple pathways to reach a goal, to one long hallway.
I understand that Toto-Rak was not popular with most people, but at the very least you could go about collecting those energy sprites in different ways if you wished, and the map was wild enough that you could take some wacky paths and not play it through exactly the same each time. And I think it's fair to extrapolate that design choice out past the ARR dungeon redesigns to see that they're taking this hyper streamlined amusement park approach to all the new content which does not allow for variety or unpredictability at all.
New maps don't have the same visual interest outside of the meager city teleport points, compared to the older maps. Almost everywhere is fly-over territory and doesn't really encourage exploration or offer lore tidbits.
Some of this simplification may have honestly been made in response to some louder folks complaining that they didn't like certain elements and just wanted to focus on the meat of the content, but I think this was a monkey's paw situation where they trimmed and cut down on frankly way too much.