Everything Jagex touches turns to shit. They are not good at creating. At best they are a steward for already created IP and the community provides that taste that makes it good.
If anything, they're one of the first companies proving that getting away from gatcha/pay-to-win/pay-for-aesthetic/seasonal mechanics can be a good business decision in 2026, where there are many, many gamers who care about earned power (and earned aesthetic) and no longer want to be on a seasonal loot/rating treadmill.
For me, that's personal and I'm happy about it. I've played MMORPGs my whole life, really the only genre I'm interested in. Everquest, EQ2, GW, WoW (and many xpacs), OSRS, etc. Other than OSRS more recently, I've felt left behind for many, many years now. I want to play games where the journey is the point, and where earning what you have is fundamental.
WoW Forever, which in terms of player numbers is looking to be Blizzard's most successful move in over a decade, is coming largely due to the trail blazed by OSRS and the Jagex team.
OSRS as a product is unique in the MMO space because it really is a product of passion. RS3, the former Jagex cash cow, was a product of a private equity. Now, after over a decade of profit extraction, everyone I knew who played it has long since quit because the updates became sparse, the artstyle because sanitized and generic, and the game mechanics became predatory. I don't blieve that any specifics have ever been made public, but the general understanding is that OSRS is largely unmolested because the playerbase were provably people who violently reject microtransactions, and the private equity owners would have killed their best possible investment by modelling it after RS3.
Jagex the company, for all its success, is a bad game studio. Look into all their shuttered and unreleased games, and their declining playerbases. Christ, their Transformers Universe game went live for a public beta and was shuttered after 2 weeks with full refunds, at the development expense of Stellar Dawn. OSRS is an anomaly that Jagex is lucky to have, and not something they are capable of recreating.
What you're describing at the end is an attempt for a company to diversify and cutting their losses early to stem bleeding from projects which wouldn't have met the expected ROI. Gaming is a difficult industry and the majority of games do not get big. It's not surprising that the majority of their efforts to branch out failed.
None of your criticisms of the main game apply during the past year of updates. That + their attempt to create "sanitized" servers this year looks like another attempt to diversify - away from the microtransaction-based revenue source into a stable subscription source, assuming they get the playercounts.
What the MTX team apparently did is pocket all of it while not using the money to improve the game
Whether or not they're doing a good job now, their behavior across many years was/is despicable