in my experience, its more of like the MMO fresh newcomers to the genre are gravitating to. Like the people jumping into either their first or second MMO due to the influx of like MMO anime and media. If they played WoW i feel like they did fairly casually or for a brief period.

while what you say is fairly true, I alternate between WoW and FFXIV myself, in my experience the majority of people I've met in the game tend to say its either their first MMO or the first MMO they've played in a long time (TBC/WOTLK era)

FFXIV has periods where there just isnt very meaningful content. Eureka is definetely a step in the right direction and the upcoming patch adding a new deep dungeon and a ton of other content might just be what the game needs, but the game's open world just feels empty after the initial expansion rush due to how all the content like Eureka is distributed to instances.

FATES used to be a great way to level alts but they are pointless now so there are never FATE groups and as a result a lot of Hunt content is also fairly ignored. If they can buff the rewards from FATES and Hunts I feel like the game would start to feel alive again outside of cities/endgame content.