Well you need the renown period later on for 2nd part story as you’ll need Rank 8 on all 4 factions or no story.
So you are either gonna do the side quest everyone should its 2 levels on top of that more if you use Darkmoon buff.
You also need to do side quest to unlock world quest or you only have the default 6 per zone instead of the 30+ Quest per zone to pull from.
But not many know this atm that all WQ but select few are locked unless you do the actual quest first. then its added into cycle this why people dont see any WQ atm as they not touched anything side related