I think of it like this. I played Dark Souls 3 as my first souls game. I loved every second of it. The world, the graphics, the scope, etc. Yet everyone places it pretty far down the list. People hyped up DS1 big time, but when I went and played the remaster when it was released (mind you I had completed DS3 -> Bloodborne -> DS2 SotFS -> at this point and was like THIS is what people hyped up? It felt so bad compared to the more recent entries (specifically DS3 and Bloodborne), but I think it's similar in the vein to the FF14 thing.
ARR reads and plays like a year 2000 game. Shadowbringers doesn't, hell even Heavensward doesn't. It's a jarring experience. I don't know what the solution is. Honestly ARR could probably be fixed with some additional trimming and just letting people use fucking linkpearls and stop the courier service frequency. That alone could both speed up and help remove some of the nonsense (let us use the echo combined with Linkpearls to like phase there automatically or something in spirit.