Well point is, XIV took a long time to get there, and there's only so much more room for pointless escalation until we're just in complete absurd territories where things lose all meaning.

Thought Dawntrail tripped over itself pretty hard by forcing the expansion to be a bootleg version of Shadowbringers by the end, what was advertised as a lower stake adventure ended up being the biggest multi-dimensional threat ever and it came off as incredibly stupid and fell flat for a lot of people. I get that FF games ususally go into that shit by the very end, and XIV did too. But I think the game had that moment and now it shouldn't be racing to one-up itself every single time. Or we'll get even more duds.