I'm late to this discussion, but I've been watching a few videos about this from content creators and I find this argument impossible to defend.

Taking ARR out (it's not really an expansion), you can't actually think EW is worse than HW. HW had much worse and less content and while the story, including the patches, was better, that era didn't have what people are complaining about now. Maybe less job homogenization, but also absolute dumpster tier jobs that people didn't play.

So yeah, things are a bit rough (specially now that a lot of new players are caught up), but the worst one? I can't agree with that.