Thankfully, Classic is around the corner.
Maybe a game built around grind which withholds content until fixed dates in an effort to stretch the run-time out just isn't as popular as it was 10 years ago. Players have a load more options ("Services") competing for their attention now.
To try not to be just another personal anecdote, the major WoW streamers like Asmongold, Preach, and Bellular have all made scathing reviews of the BfA expansion and it's systems. The WoW subreddit is very vocal about how bad the expansion is. People are finding it hard to find a reason to log in.
Hopefully Blizzard can take notes from this with WoW classic
It could work for Blizzard too, they share a customer base with similar outlooks and mentality... to put it politely.
As a result, the more fringe communities (which tend to be correlated both with emergent forms of gameplay and experience with the game; skilling and PvP being the big examples) get starved or actively harmed by the course of development. As a result, those players leave or become less engaged, furthering the cycle and leaving the game a less-interesting place.
Back in the day I never thought I'd whine about Jagex becoming better at listening. I guess it's sort of similar to issues that can be had with A/B testing - when engagement is the name of the game and you have easy access to knobs and feedback, you can end up overfitting. In the terminology of this thread, the bean-counter approach makes you long for the touch of the auteur.
disclaimer: 20k-hour multiply maxed get-off-my-lawn grump with several axes to grind
It's just astonishing how well they've managed to reclaim their market.
I know a couple maxers who still devote 10-20 hours a week to RS. I can't fathom how they find new ways to entertain themselves, but they do. It never gets old for them. I never got into RS but by all accounts they've perfected a genre.