I have a friend that is hard anti to FFXIV. I didn't really get the reasoning until I had some interactions with some of the folks coming out of that MMO space. There's so many degenerate hugboxes developed around that game. I don't even want to know what happens on those discord servers. It looks like a solid game that I'd be interested in, but, man, that community is a hard filter.
For a fantasy MMO, after a Realm Reborn, it strikes me as being too accessible. As a result, it doesn't filter out those that can't play a game properly, so the appeal is RPing. That's when it all goes down hill.