Gearing and essences are not comparable. You can get gear from doing anything you want or enjoy. Essences are on rail requirements. If I could get blood of the enemy for doing whatever content I enjoy like M+ or raiding instead of pvp I would never have cared if they were account wide or not. People just don't like being forced into the same unchanging grind over and over again for them which is why blizzard caved and gave us this method for getting them account wide and then even loosened the spec restrictions required for unlocking some of them too.