You’re misunderstanding the problem.
The problem isn’t that “raiding is only about gear”. Quite the contrary, raiding has long been one of the worst ways to gear that exists. Raiding isn’t about getting gear, raiding is more usually about NOT getting gear.
The problem is with Blizzard tuning raiding around the assumption that everyone does M+, which makes M+ mandatory.
That started in Nighthold. It never occurred to Blizzard that people would both raid and do M+, so in Emerald Nightmare people waltzed into the raid having already outgeared it by spamming M+.
So in Nighthold, they supertuned the raid so that if you weren’t gearing through M+ first, the raid was overtuned for you. I remember there was even a fatboss video (remember them?) lamenting how, even after you cleared the raid and had it on farm, farm never felt easier because the entire raid was overtuned from the start on the assumption that you were already fully geared.
You used to be able to gear for raiding, by raiding. You can’t do that anymore. That’s the problem. Now in order to spend 2-3 nights raiding every week, you also have to spend 2-3 nights doing M+ every week. It’s turned raiding into a 2nd job and has been causing huge burnout since BfA.