Absolutely.
WoW is a COMBAT SIMULATOR since ages. Anything added besides that is.. trash most of the time. Like, garrisons, pet battles, warfronts, you name it.
The masses of people don't even LIKE mmo's. WoW was NOT successful because it was an MMO - it could have been a Diablo game with monthly fee, after Warcraft 1-2-3 it would be 100% a hit.
Blizz realized soon that the masses don't like the tediousness of MMOs - they made WoW a "baby" MMO, making everything in it "easy". Over time people saw that the MMO-like things are easy: reputation, professions, languages, over-arching storylines, faction vs. faction war, they were all meaningless IN WOW. And they gradually removed it.
Now we have what people "liked": the combat.
And it is glorious, in Legion and BfA I had 2 characters, now I have 9, all of them were 210+ before 9.1.
Blizz devs should cater to THEIR playerbase: the minmaxer combat fans. We don't need shit like farming rares for mounts. We need MORE instances, more interactions between specs, multiple raid instances in a season... and just make the gear/sytem treadmill invisible, and we have a game that has 2-3 seasons per year and I would pay the sub till the day I die.