Is this your first MMO?

People invest huge amounts of time and money into these types of games. The achievements, mounts, minions, gear, glamour, social network, etc. that they collect over time represent that investment and it's fairly normal for people to not want to move on and leave them behind.

The point at which the state of the game becomes bad enough to outweigh the sunk cost will vary from player to player but everyone has a breaking point. Once they reach it, they will move on and get settled somewhere else, at which point it becomes very difficult to get them back.

This is essentially what happened in WoW. People stuck it out through WoD and BFA before things finally got bad enough in Shadowlands that people just weren't willing to stick around any more. 6.1-6.5 was pretty dire. Dawntrail hasn't been great so far. If things haven't improved by 8.0 then I really don't think it's looking good for XIV.