At 35 you're only 1/3 of the way there, at 45 barely halfway. This is a pretty typical XP scale, or was for the era anyway. The estimates I've seen for actual time played to reach 60 are in the range of 5 days for speedrunners, more like 10 days for casual or ineffecient leveling.

In the grand scheme, I guess 240 hours just to hit the level cap on one character seems like a lot; what's the last game you played for 250+ hours in a single run, right? But even some relatively modern games require similar played times to max out. When it first released, the typical 1-50 played for SWTOR was over 100 hours, and that didn't seem so awful at the time. It's been massively shortened since then, but I had multiple alts long before the leveling reforms. Maxing out CP in ESO probably takes more than this now; the nominal level 50 cap there is really just the end of the tutorial, and doing all of the available story content also takes quite a long while. Same for FFXIV if you want to max out all jobs and finish the story, which is legendary for the amount of time it takes to slog through.

That's not to mention much older titles, early 2000s era, where the grind could be an order of magnitude longer than this. My first MMO was Anarchy Online, and, being a dumbass and having no idea at all what I was doing, it took me around 2,200 hours played before I had my first (and only) character leveled up to the cap (220, but the way XP worked in that game it was more like 400-500 levels in reality), and only halfway respectably geared.

In that context, it's easy to see why WoW was panned as the ultimate "casual" MMO when it came out. And looking at it from the perspective of having done all this over again in more games than I care to admit, this seems fine.