It's easy for people to overlook Legion's flaws since it came after the horrible content drought of WoD and was then followed by BfA.

A lot of people don't realize that many of the things people dislike about BfA (some examples are gearing RNG, AP grinding, overpruned classes that feel too similar, having to farm Legendaries/Essences for weeks to months on alts) were present in or even originated from Legion.

I mean, BfA heavily nerfed Forging by making it much less likely to happen, making weapons unable to Warforge over 10 iLvLs, and making Azerite unable to Forge at all.

And the base state (no external systems applied) of classes actually mostly improved in BfA, but no one is going to tell you that because the Artifacts and Legendaries did such a good job of hiding Legion's massively flawed class design.