Your last few sentences really hit. This is what occurred to World of Warcraft. I've been playing the re-release of Classic WoW, Season of Mastery, and I find the experience much more compelling than any common day mass multi-player online experience.
Yes WoW is exactly the primary example of "arcadeization" as I call it and why companies should not listen to their vocal playerbase sometimes.
WoW went from a game where player interaction was the norm (both negative and positive), going to a dungeon was a massive adventure just for getting there, you would have meaningful interactions with other players, coordinating to get to a place, giving directions, traversing what felt a living world with living players. Also the opposite was true, you would dislike some people for how they acted or played or ganked, but all of that had human interaction at heart.
But then going to dungeons became a chore for acquiring tokens, and this all stopped being fun, and we got automatic queues and people barely speak to each other anymore, and if they do, it's for insulting a player for a bad pull or for not waiting the healer.
It's sad but I believe that modern online gaming exchanged meaningful and durable human interactions for ease of use and quick consumption.
I remember talking to thousands of people and knowing pretty much everyone in a hundred of Counter Strike clans in Italy 20 years ago.
This image [1] will be 20 years old in few months, this is the SMAU Italian Lan Party 2002. 1200 PC gamers brought their own computers, setup up a giant lan, to meet and interact and fight each other and form friendships in the same place! 1200! 20 years ago!
Today it's a miracle if you can get few dozens people to play in the same place, there's barely any human interaction from gamers, neither in person nor online.
It's sad, maybe I'm just old and it's nostalgia, but I liked it more as it was before.
