The context of the situation in the past is important. The game was growing pre-Endwalker because the story was good. There was content to look forwards to, patches didn't take as long to come out, and there was more to do. (Relics generally came out closer to launch, or at launch, Exploration zones, ect) that kept people playing. The devs communicated more openly with the community and Yoshi P generally seemed to be more involved. That is no longer the case anymore. The goodwill with the community they had is gone.

The reality of this game currently is that the Story turned a lot of people off, there is 4.5 months between patches that hardly add anything, we haven't had an exploration zone since ShB (Who knows when the DT one will come out with the content they keep pushing back to later patches.) and the competition is heating up. WoW wants its players back, and they're busting out the content to try lure dissatisfied XIV players back. Free to play games are constantly updating themselves every month with new content, meanwhile XIV is sitting around like a rotting carcass between its 5 month patches. I doubt that this game will ever have a popularity surge on the scale of the WoW exodus again. Consider also that they've talked about linking JP/OCE/NA/EU and I don't think that Dynamis can sustain itself, even in a long term scenario without changes being made to address the bleed off between expansions/patches. Call me pessimistic.