Yeah they changed it a lot in the past few years or so. They removed a lot of the filler quests and remade the final dungeons and raids (they split the huge final AAR dungeon into three smaller ones for example). They also made it possible to do all the main quest dungeons with bots so if you don’t want to play with real people or can’t you can still go through it. The bots are the characters that appear in the story so it’s quite lore friendly too.

Though there still are some hiccups in ARR, the biggest one being the Crystal Tower raids which are required to progress the story and can’t be done with bots as they require 24 people total. New players have a lot of issues with the queues for that one, sometimes waiting for an hour or more in queue from what I’ve seen.

But yeah I recommend anyone that likes story games and Final Fantasy games to give it a go, it starts fairly slow but the story is amazing when it gets going. Also the game is filled to the brim with references to other Final Fantasy games, it’s a love letter to the franchise. Oh also the music is outstanding, one of the best music in any video game.