The old adage “never read the comments section” applies here.
Golden is, objectively, an excellent writer, and has been center in defining a lot of the “soft lore” of WoW since 2001. That said, you can say her style is not your cuppa, but just because you don’t particularly like her writing style doesn’t make her a bad writer.
The story itself is a character study of Anduin: what happens to someone who was incredibly sheltered, and in many ways spoiled, brought into authority too soon and without the proper tempering, then violated; and then having to process the trauma.
It’s also does a bit of “soft” world building. What do I mean by that? Borrowing from the definition of “hard” and “soft” magic systems, “hard” world building is the creator laying out the world directly. In this case, “in game.” What we play through, what we learn through flavor text, is the “hard” world building.
“Soft” world building is the ancillary stuff: the information that is not playable in game. It’s fleshing out the greater world that creates the background “mind palace" in which we, as characters, exist. In D&D terms, it’s the Drizzt book in comparison to the game module you sit down at the table and play through.
With this tale, we learn a bit about what Stormsong Valley is like after the Fourth War - an environment we will never see in game because Blizzard rarely redesigns old zones, and you can’t play through a sleepy town with the occasional raid. If we ever do go back to Stormsong, it will be because of some existential crisis, and we will not see a sleepy village and day-to-day lives of the citizenry.
We also get to see a snapshot of what life was like for veterans of the Fourth War - keeping in mind that the Alliance’s experiences are not parallel to that of the Horde. The Alliance did not start the war: designed to be a meat-grinder war (a war which is designed to basically throw bodies at each other until one side runs out of bodies). The Fourth War was the equivalent of World War I in terms of approach, and just like World War 1 broke many (They are not called the “Lost Generation” for nothing), the Fourth War still has a lot of fallout, and if anyone thinks that you just “come back” from war unchanged, you really don’t know, or you don’t listen to those who have - and maybe opinions shouldn’t be derived from war RPGs, tv shows and movies.
If this Anduin is not the Anduin you remember from Mists or even BfA, it is because he is NOT the same Anduin. He is an Anduin who became king too soon, guided a war he was not prepared for and then co-opted by effectively a “god” and committed acts that were in direct violation to his core principles. He’s not going to just “bounce back” and be the same Anduin you remember from 15 years ago. That’s not how storytelling works, and that’s not how people work.
It’s OK to not like how a character’s story arc is going. It’s OK to have your own thoughts on “what should have happened.” But Golden isn’t writing in a vacuum. Any writer hired by Blizzard is given “talking points” that need to be addressed in the story (get so-and-so from point a to point b). The writer then crafts the tale with those goals in mind. And Blizzard has to APPROVE the story. So whether you like the tale or not, whether you believe Anduin is acting “in character” or not, Blizzard approved the story, so that is the story Blizzard wanted told, and Blizzard is saying that what we read is in character, because Anduin is Blizzard’s character.
For the record, the following are seminal works of Golden’s - works which have gone far to define the overarching paracosm of WoW - what made the Horde the Horde, specifically, beyond the initial Vanilla experiences which have perpetuated amongst the community each expansion since:
Note: This is a partial list
- Lord of the Clans] (2001)
- Rise of the Horde] (2006)
- Beyond the Dark Portal], with Aaron Rosenberg (2008)
- Arthas: Rise of the Lich King] (2009)
- Thrall: Twilight of the Aspects] (2011)
- Jaina Proudmoore: Tides of War] (2012)
- War Crimes (2014)
- Warcraft: Durotan, with Chris Metzen (2016)
- Windrunner: Three Sisters (2018)
- Before the Storm (2018)
- Elegy (2018)
The tl;dnr is that Golden has been writing about Warcraft since before the MMORPG even launched. She knows the source material and plays the game. The reader needs to simply be self-aware enough to understand personal preference versus objective assessment; i.e.: you can dislike something on personal grounds, but just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean that something is objectively bad.