Oh, they know the game to a reasonable degree. It’s not rocket surgery, to quote Sebudai’s old meme wisecrack from back in the day.
If anything I’d say it’s a lot easier to pick up these days, as leveling content is generally far, far less deadly even if you make some mistakes. Contrast Vanilla/TBC era where it was actually pretty dang easy to die on many classes, pulling an extra mob meant it was time to grit your teeth for the graveyard run, and there were odd idiosyncrasies with difficulty as you leveled (e.g., odd numbered levels were often unusually hard, especially ones ending in 9: the mobs were almost as hard as they would be one level later but you didn’t have the New Big Thing you were about to get that level).
Now the only noticeable difficulty spikes when leveling are either when there’s an actual bug with something or going into the latest expansion pack, which can be some or other degree of harsh depending on the particulars of the ilvl jump; DF’s can be pretty mean on some classes because you get new gear so slowly - you won’t finish your full introductory set till you’re done with the whole first zone - and the old gear from Chromie Time is like paper by comparison, while there is no catch up vendor this time around like there was with, say, Cata (which had a very similar gear leap if you didn’t raid on that character in the previous xpac). Even on an Elemental Shaman - probably one of the most resilient of specs for solo content - I had a few close calls before the gear upgrades started coming in.
And questing is largely solo and is actually pretty dang chill.
What we really need to work on is retaining the new players once they hit endgame, and that’s going to take a lot of focused culture-shift work. Players won’t stay if they find out their play session mostly consists of waiting around to see if they will even get to play (i.e., lengthy stretches of applying to group after group before actually getting one). Even FFXIV players who are much more zealous about how awesome their game is to the point that they shred people apart for even daring to mention the warts lose patience after spending long enough waiting instead of playing (see: Alliance Raid or PVP queues, or the queues to even get onto the server during Endwalker launch).
The biggest part there is going to be matching people up with other patient players and starry-eyed newcomers/returners. Our community fails hard at that because almost every corner is dominated by cynical veterans that all too often see anyone less experienced as a likely drag on their play time.
The PUG finder’s great for hardcore players but the troubles for anyone behind the curve for any reason have been stated plenty enough on these boards.
Guilds and communities that are less demanding are routinely mentioned to exist, but apart from a few outliers like “WoW Made Easy” actually finding them is made difficult by the nature of the community’s recruitment meeting-places, which are not especially friendly for anxious new and casual players (I have often described the atmosphere of a typical recruitment Discord as “LinkedIn for Raiders” with all the vibe that implies). In other words, hardcore players find it easy to get matched with other hardcore players, but “mere mortals” find it much more difficult to do so, and the exhausting nature of the “mainstream communities” means that once they do, they are very likely to part ways with said communities - meaning that the breadcrumbs for those who come after them are gone and there is a progressively increasing notion of “the community is too elitist” left behind.
I feel like social media exacerbates it as well: social media platforms are, unfortunately, not actually in the business of encouraging healthy communities. Like TV, the content is merely a means to an end, and the real end is getting you there so you’ll watch the paid advertisements that are placed with said content (the main exception currently is Discord, I’m still not sure what their “actually makes money” business plan is supposed to be; I don’t think it can be entirely Nitro because most platforms these days that have subscriptions still need to supplement that income with ads or other MTX, see WoW itself for instance).
The upshot though is that SM is concerned mainly about that what you post is going to be “safe” content that advertisers and investors will feel comfy about supporting. That has a very ugly side effect when it comes to communities hosted ON social media, which is that now your main responsibility as community admin is less to promote community growth and development as to assure the platform Trust and Safety team that it’s not going to be a problem for their paymasters.
This then leads to a well-observed phenomenon with social communities nowadays: most are, in fact, not run by people with a passion for a friendly community, but by people who are super-hardcore into the topic (and who either don’t work or who have cushy jobs that give them the spare time to monitor the community from work) or whose passion is for running and controlling communities, rather than for the topic itself (see: supermods on Reddit for an Exhibit A of this).
I have suggested a regression to the old IRC and TeamSpeak/Vent/Mumble infrastructure that used to be the going thing in gaming before MSSM took over - as most IRC networks were considerably less fixated on the whole “safety” issue that leads to this sort of moderation atmosphere, but actually getting people to use them who aren’t already Internet vets who used them in the past doesn’t seem to gain traction either. 
Private communities lessen the “beat cop” pressure, but private communities by their nature also can’t well be found (see the above problem: the kind of people that newer and more laid back players would actually like to play with tend to partition off into these private communities, and sever ties with the mainstream watering holes - meaning that said players go to the mainstream matchup meets, find nothing that suits them while being (truthfully, but not usefully) told that they do exist, and eventually either have a nervous breakdown and get quieted/banned from the server or simply give up).
That leaves “meet people in PUGs and hope you hit it off” but when even getting INTO a PUG worth spending time in is already such a tough task, again it positive feedback selects for the already established players.
As such I’ve well established the problem - but I still despair for a solution that people will actually go for, while noting that it seems to be an issue with not only both WoW and FFXIV, but if you follow around on forums, you’ll notice it’s a thing with almost every MMO that has traditional cooperative endgame content (GW2? Lost Ark? Destiny 2? You might as well be reading the same forum sometimes for what it’s worth) - i.e., it’s a people issue, not a specific game design issue …
