You pretty much needed a large group of friends, real life or not, during vanilla with 40 man raids.
You also don’t need a large group of friends or be a sweat lord to be successful now. Plenty of players are able to get +8s done for Gilded crests and craft 636 gear. Many are able to get +10s done for vault. The issue here is unfounded expectations of getting top tier rewards when WoW has always reserved the best gear for the hardest challenges. This goes back to Vanilla.
Why do people feels that they are entitled to Myth track rewards from M+ or Delves when it’s been fully accepted that not everyone will complete Mythic Raids and get CE? This is purely double standards.
In Blizzard’s own words:
In which case, Delves is far too rewarding for the difficulty. It goes against their stated black and white philosophy. You feelings and my feeling don’t matter. They clearly stated that reward should correlate to the difficulty.