Mate, it was a lot worse, and on top of that it wasn't account bound in the beginning. You only need 7k Honored for Siege/King's Rest and then finish your faction's main storyline for the other (no rep/grind required, just do the loremaster basically). While IIRC, for Arcway and CoS you needed Revered, but I might be wrong on that.
I feel something that we don't notice is that BfA seems to have a lot of backend changes. Developing the technology for both Warfronts and Islands must have taken quite a while. Same for the automated stat/ilvl squish, Warmode, etc, etc,...
And I feel like going forward, Blizzard will need to spend more and more time each expansion to re-write their engine. I do agree that there is a lack of things to do at max level compared to Legion. At least, I miss a reason for playing/leveling alts. Class campaigns were great for that. However, the content we do have, is WAY better than Legion for me.