Reps have always been in the game and stygia is largely negligible. What made BFA obnoxious is that, and I don’t know if you remember this, but your character’s progress in both endgame power and storyline progression was tied to how effectively they were grinding reps. Characters who had more rep with Magni had more powerful hearts of Azeroth, and progress in the war campaign was directly locked to how much rep with the 7th Legion you had. Shadowlands doesn’t have any of that.
BFA also had a huge problem where, if you weren’t keeping up with the grind, you ran into the risk of getting gear that was better than the stuff you had on but you were locked out of actually using said gear’s azerite powers at all until you caught up with your grind.
Now, for what it was, I had fun in BFA, but we need to be honest and give patch 8.2 the credit it deserves for actually putting the game into a playable state. Up until that point, the game was atrocious.