I mean if we strictly go by the lore then there should only be anima left in places where the jailer's forces intrude or in places where he and his allies (mostly Denathrius) have hoarded it. Since no souls get into the shadowlands anima should become even more scarce besides the aforementioned sources, yet miraculously we still find alot of it each day for grinding mind-numbingly boring WQs. So the whole lore angle is complete and utter bullshit in the first place.
Walking past these giant anima containers and just letting them sit there while filled to the brim is already kicking the lore and visual story telling with feet. Not to mention how the random covenant trainees from the callings put down containers full of it as well, just so that we can detonate them; rare resource for sure. Then there is the fact that CN of all places drops by far the most pathetic amount of anima of all possible sources, short of getting nothing at all (unless you run it multiple times, then that is the case as well), despite being lorewise one of the most abundand anima sources left. So I personally think that approach doesn't hold much water to begin with.
All that aside, as you said and even Blizzard admitted with the maw, it's still a game and should be fun. Currently the grind to unlock things to do is everything but. Especially since you know they will add catch-up for these things later. It becomes less and less appealing to start playing the game from the beginning tbh, since all the artificial gating disrupts any natural flow. In legion I was giving them the benefit of doubt as they clearly needed to learn how to finetune their alternate proression systems first. But after corruption in late BFA it's clear that all this has method.