It’s like the first tier of MoP all over again.
In Cata and Wotlk and TBC there was a badge gear vendor. You would get badges from doing heroics and be able to buy entry level raid gear including 2 tier pieces and trinkets. This upgraded every patch. Every reputation also sold epics at exalted. You also had Wintergrasp and Tol Barad
Then in MoP they tied all of the entry raid gear to exalted reputations, which meant you had to grind all of the reps to exalted to get any entry level epics for pve. This was incredibly hated, and blizzard then took that feedback that people hated the badge vendors, when in reality it was there stupid change to the badge vendor after 3 great expansions that was unpopular