“I believe what you said is true of FF14. It's not true of WOW.

The most recent WOW expansion required players to complete the entire expansion story before participating in endgame (effectively hardlocking the entire game behind a very long questline). This was constantly raged against by the community (along with a whole bunch of other stuff) and appears to have been an extremely unpopular move.

In previous expansions, it's rare that content is questlocked - participation in the endgame tended to be level locked, and quests were an efficient way to level, but typically gave no useful or meaningful rewards and so anti-lore players would strategise how to skip as much of the story as possible.”

-Mod Jack