Yes, gilgamesh specifically as well as other extremely high pop servers were restricted as they were with stormblood release, that's normal but that's not the scale of what's happening right now. Dont forget that during that time Aether and Primal were the only datacenters as crystal didnt exist. If something on this scale were to have occured then, people literally would not have been able to make characters in NA at all which would have caused a complete outrage. Yes character creation of specific worlds was blocked, but that was normal and expected as with the release of cross world play you could create cross world parties, therefore eliminating the absolute need to be on the same server. Where in comparison, right now if you are on aether and want a new player to play with you, they literally cannot in any way play with you. At all. Completely locked down, that's the difference. World congestion vs an entire datacenter congestion.