I’m enjoying it while I can, I hate the hyper realism approach to graphics in games and even though its been going that direction since cata I’m hoping its reached its peak. I hate playing diablo 4 for that reason, systems aside whatever it just feels better on my eyes playing a game like d3. There’s only so much you can reduce in options before you start to lose essential visual cues. And the top players support this as the most popular addon for high level play (weakauras) literally converts blizzard make visual cues to a simpler visual one, nobodies making weakauras that are visual spaghetti
Im not sure, really. My friends play so there is that. I still play EQ, too, every expansion I get some raid tiers done and then I find something that annoys me and I leave again. I grew up on EQ, so it’s particularly hard for me to leave it behind.
I enjoy WoW’s end game to an extent. End game is where I find my enjoyment in pretty much all the games. I have tried FF14 and while I do enjoy it I’m not much a quester. So, I ended up in Endwalker and it was getting stale. I just wanted to start looking into raids there but I had a lot of story ahead of me and learning everything I’d need to get my foot in the door seemed like too much hassle. I’m already established over here so I can do all the end game I want. 
Blizzard became the de facto standard for pc gaming in the 90’s with Warcraft RTS, then diablo and starcraft. Wow was their last major project before the company started to fall apart, bail out, and sell off.
Wow became the de facto standard for mmos. Sadly, no version of wow today is any better than it was 20 years ago, some would argue it’s gone downhill. It offers slightly better graphics, more buttons to push, mini games, and options to purchase almost anything on the shop, but it’s fundamentally the same thing as 2004 version imo.
Misguided brand loyalty is a huge part of it though. Blizzard isn’t the infallible creative team it once was, yet Microsoft buys them out for billions instead of competing head to head by creating their own product to compete with wow, which I would argue should be quite easy for them!
And yeah, everything else to release in the last 20 years is rushed to market, underdeveloped garbage. Ig all these entertainment corporations either don’t have the talent on board that they’re paying for, or they aren’t inesting enough or properly.
Cost sunk fallacy. Thats mainly it. Many people have wasted their lives in pursuit of pixels so its all they really have left. Especially the token subbers.
As a solo player whose aware of how toxic pugs can be and the mess and mass of spell effects I ask myself this question everyday.