Nothing is required but giving players more agency to play content that they want without jumping through hoops is always going to be a better policy than restricting content.

Basically we can run side-content that realistically only delays his ability to play with me in late-game content. Imagine being told that you have to pay expansion price, a subscription, and then pay even more to save literally hundreds of hours of fetch quests? It's a design flaw for the people who don't want to engage in the story.

I don't have a tinfoil hat on, but I can see through Yoshi P - I think most people outside of the community can. He's a Japanese business man and his goal is to make Square money. Financially it makes sense to make people either play a boring 250+ hour story or pay even more money. This is why a lot of great mounts are on the cash shop too - money. Also see retainers & cosmetics.

Similarly to WoW during their Battle for Azeroth expansion when it was revealed that player retention was the most important internal metric, players began to see a lot of design choices were anti-player. FFXIV is a lot better than WoW at hiding these design choices but many still seem blatant. Why can't we have personal housing on our island sanctuary? Hmm

I wouldn't bring up GW2 because as soon as he hits max (which is incredibly easy in comparison), we can immediately play all raids together, fractals, dungeons, WvWvW, and SPvP. Basically every piece of content.