When content is easily accessible, Blizzard has to over reward the content so somebody will actually do it. Islands and world quests are the only way to farm AP, because if they weren’t, nobody would do them. Warfronts drop normal and heroic raid loot, because if they didn’t, nobody would do them. Besides raids, M+ and PvP, there is no engaging content left in the game.
Also I think the Mage Tower showed us that we don’t need afk’able content in order to have a good participation metric. They should have taken that info and ran with it, but instead, we just keep getting boring, brainless content.