In Legion every character and indeed every spec of every character got some lore to go with a weapon, and each weapon had it's own tree and set of abilities. In BfA you got Azerite Armour, and the vast majority of powers on it early on were either generic or junk. What's more, once you finally got a good piece you then had the problem that new gear would be a downgrade until you finally got a high ilevel version of the piece you already had. And this system was the replacement for both the Legion weapon and tier sets.
Then we got the necklace on top of that, which meant a bunch of grinding, and if you best power was in content you didn't do, well you just sucked. And the powers were all generic - no spec or even class customisation.
And then we had corruption on top of that, and it was the same but even more insanely powerful, and terribly balanced into the bargain, so some classes simply got more out of it than others did. And the 'fix' for that was to put it on a vendor, but have the options cycle so you had to have the currency saved up, and if you didn't (because you had a new alt or whatever), tough luck until the vendor cycled back around.
Gearing was absolutely awful in BfA, plain and simple.