When I played through ARR for the first time, I thought it was completely fine, but nothing particularly outstanding. At the same time though, I never really felt like my precious time was being critically wasted just by playing through the basic leveling process of the game, though that was 6 years ago and some standards have changed since then, obviously. I think it's unfair to claim it's "bad" for the first 200 hours or something, it's just obviously not their best stuff.
I mean, I think the larger problem with ARR is gameplay related (it's a shame that the gameplay part of the game never factors into these conversations but that's modern MMOs for you I guess) - the low level gameplay is really boring, which has only been made worse every single expansion where they try to maintain a similar overall number of buttons, so they just take buttons away from the low level stuff so they can re-add abilities to the new higher levels. It leaves almost all jobs feeling hollow and incomplete for nearly the entirety of the time you play, and since low-level content is so old, absolutely no one takes it seriously and any challenging aspect of them has been nerfed into oblivion. That's kind of why a lot of XIV recommendations come with "it's an amazing game - but if you're not current with it, you're never going to think it's as cool as I do" because by the time you're playing through most of the content, the only thing of any value at all is the story.
I re-played through all of the expansions recently, in fact, and the actual time it took wasn't really that long. It was just so dull to play through content people just rush through and you're hitting like three buttons in because they keep simplifying the low level gameplay so much. SE should get more criticism about how oversimplified the gameplay has become for the low level content, but since no one cares about gameplay the only complaints they've decided to address are "we'll condense some of the story quests I guess."
I think the best way to explain the appeal of FFXIV is by viewing its story as a long-running TV show that constantly builds on its continuity and has arcs beginning and ending in really fun, bombastic, cliffhanger-style endings that lead into the next "episodes" and with a huge ensemble cast. But reveals that were exciting mic drops at the time, that you would ponder on for months with the rest of the community, are pretty shortlived now.
