I would probably finish with some of the older content (nazjatar, war campaigns etc) in order to get to 8.3 content where you can easily gear your character and get your cloak going. After that, the gearing process comes down to mostly visions, m+, raiding or even pvp if that’s what you’re going to be doing. By the way, gearing includes your azerite power and essences, I wouldn’t call it a separate task.
After that you can kind of decide what you want to do. Do you have flying yet? If not, you can work towards pathfinder. The most important stuff in my opinion is to go for 8.3 content which means you will kind of ignore the 8.2 stuff once you get past that. You can always revisit it later if you wish.