That's a very good point, especially concerning Shadowlands main features: The Maw is basically here to delay your gem sockets acquisition, Torghast your legendaries acquisition / item level. You can't grind them, everything is timegated to produce MAUs rather than letting people play however they want.
As I said, the game has slowly painted itself into a design corner.
FIrstly, the time where XP was meaningful has dropped relative to the rest. Expansions last
two years, and the time to cap has shrunk steadily to the point where you essentially cap in, what, 25 hours of /played. 30 if you're a filthy casual that takes AFK breaks all the time?
Once you're past that tiny, tiny little window, every single trash mob is null and void. They attack you while you run around? You're not going to stop to fight them if you can run away. It's not that it's dangerous, it's that it is a stupid USELESS delay.
And it's been compounded by the "oh, we're scaling everything", which basically makes you feel that, in fact, the leveling period is not there to progress - it's there to delay you from reaching max level! So the XP you got no longer feels like a reward.
Secondly, at cap, there is nothing to further refine your character besides your ilvl. Secondaries to differentiate good items for your spec from bad items for your spec aside, the only progression there is is gear... except that your gear acquisition phase has to last TWO years (see above).
They've figured out relatively quickly that they had screwed up, but by then, there was no real solution left. All they've done since is finding band-aids to stretch the gear acquisition phase over the entire expansion, since that's all there is for the majority of people.
So...
Gear resets - you probably noticed, but in terms of gearing, each major patch is now an expansion for EVERYONE (since previously, gear resets were only for raiders, and that didn't really worked). Except for the story, which they can't afford to make, and the levels, which are meaningless anyway.
Currencies for gear. If you can replace gear drops by currencies, you can now have your 30mn-bite-sized sessions drop "less than one piece of gear", since those currencies are divisible where gear was not.
Partial gear. It surprised me that they abandoned Valor upgrades for entire expansions. It's such a great way to stretch your gear acquisition - first you get the piece, then you have to get the currency (see above) to finish the gear.
TImegates for all of the above. Because if your currency can be used by a casual to upgrade, the hardcores will obtain all of the currency needed. Then, since that's all there is to progress the gear, and the gear progression is all there is in the game, it's game over for them, and every time someone cancels their sub "to wait for the patch", there's non-zero chance they're not going to reactivate it because they found another game.
And so on. You need shortcuts for returning people since you have timegates. You need multiple currencies because one is too easy to cap.
And here we are. WoW, 17 years distilled into its pure form of the streamlined carrot, that needs to remain dangling as long as they can while they write the next episode of the Warcraft saga and can have a week or two where nobody complains about lack of gear to obtain.
