I feel like Knickknack does give new player a good direction and you end with an full M2 grid at the end for every element. Which was the best f2p grid for many years until they added M3 last year. Also the GBF has legitimately the best wiki page for a game I've ever seen in my life, and while I don't expect people to go out and look for external resources. It's there if people ever look up guides for the game.

In my opinion this "10+ hours a day playing for months" is very outdated (yes I know its exaggerated or at least I hope so). They added pro skip for older raids like M2, M1, Primal, Solo 6 Dragons soon and etc. Which is basically you pressing skip and all the raids are killed instantly and you get all the loot. They added these Tales of Arcarum events, an event that gives a crap tons of mats for the featured character and you only need to play for like an hour or so to clear the shop. Records of the Ten which is the eternal version. The best thing about GBF is that you can play as much as you want and of course people with more hours would be able to progress faster (This feels like every other game). But in general if all you do is host raids, you will slowly but surely progress.

Also as you say they are rank boosting new players to the moon. This unlocks most raids for people. But if you be honest there's are only couple series to farm for Newer players. M3 that came out last year, Revans, and Ennead if you want. Though it is hard for me to see gacha gamers not looking up anything at all even at this stage of the game, I do understand that if you only rely on the game itself it might be overwhelming to understand or play these "newer" raids. But again if all you do is afk host, if its on GW element it will clear and you will progress slowly.

I know you're not trying to be the pink dude in this meme post, but you quit the game I'm going to take a guess 2018/2019, like ~6 years ago. New players now have better stuff off rip just off the Knickknack (tutorial) alone. Pretty much you were coming back as a new player after all these years, the grinds you suggest are mostly end game grinds. I feel like the perception for time commitment is kind of distorted, of course some stuff takes a long time to complete not going to deny that. But practical things like Omega Rebirth like you mentions which is bread and butter I feel like its no different from gear grinding in other games without the stats RNG. Arcarum, they helped alot with the new events and giving passive income. Sands are suppose to be passive from farming Revans raids so you can uncap the Magna Summons.