It’s all light hearted humour. I’m not that dense, I get why people would prefer a currency-driven system. It’s just not my thing, and was honestly one of the biggest reasons I stopped playing FF14.
And M+ is pretty much all I’ve done on the “end-game” scale since Legion begun. I think it’s fine as long as the quality of the items is good. Which it is because we don’t have extra-RNG layers on the stuff that drops.