Well.. For instance Havocs first tierset had 10% extra crit on Chaos Strike as 4p, our best legendary (that we have used for 2 years) added 1-12 fury to Demon bite. And our artifact traits were mostly just passives that didnt do much, just made our chaos strike hit harder or proc stuff, eye beam leaving a dot etc. Nothing super exciting, just made us do more dmg.
And as far as i can see, that's exactly what Azerite traits are doing, there's a chaos strike trait that increases its dmg and lower its cost (currently a 4.5% dps increase over having non). And there's obviously more to come as new raids gets released.
So yea, people can whine all they want. But in the end they're not that different from sets/artifact weapons and legendaries. Hopefully the power creep is a bit slower though.