I agree with this.
Over time, the content design became more complex, more difficult, which put more and more pressure on players to optimize the hell out of their characters.
Naturally, this ostracized the more casual playerbase, so in comes the multiple difficulties, leading to insane levels of ilvl power bloat(on top of player power with new talents and abilities every expansion until Legion), which in turn was the reason why they brought in scaling to try to clean up the mess.
The wrong answer to the right question, so to say.
I think the best option would be if Blizzard really just dialed back the whole “competitive MMORPG” design with endgame. Reduce the difficulties to only a couple, and leave it up to the players if they want to push for things like the highest DPS they can get, but not make it a “requirement” enforced by the game’s tuning. Something that’s still challenging for most, but gets easier the better you get, as opposed to always being a challenge no matter what you do and have.
It all comes down to player agency, though. How much choice should players have? On one hand, more choice allows players more freedom to do what they want, but on the other, it lends to players ruining the intended design of the game through their own over-optimization. In the realm of an RPG, it leaves Blizzard in a difficult crossroads.
There are those who really like endgame content being very demanding, because they feel rewarded for conquering it. Taking that thrill would bore them. At the same time, it’s fairly clear that it can be a pretty frustrating environment for someone who just plays for the typical RPG reasons, and doesn’t care about their reflexes being tested: loot, character progression, and being able to do so with their friends without feeling the urge to pull their hair out.
I cannot blame players for min/maxing so hard in modern WoW, because the game design is largely built around it for most of the endgame, but I’m not sure if there is any easy solution that will please everyone, because modern WoW has its own target audience that’s taken a different shape over time.