IIRC Arthars had a video correctly calling that shit out. A lot of the "best" players are actually very stupid about parsing and tend to require the rest of the party to have to adjust around their "MUH NUMBERS" retardation. It's weird too because, like a number of regulars have previously pointed out ITT, it's not even that hard and doesn't require such autistic degrees of optimization in order to clear content at this point. As long as you're doing the bare minimum of doing what you're supposed to do, you can clear just about anything.
What I've learned from catching the likes of hardcore streamers who aren't parsing/speedrunning autists (like Arthas, Xeems, and actual WF team members) is that the most important skill in FFXIV high end raiding is consistent mechanical execution and tempering your needs to meet the checks without killing yourself. The problem most professional parsers have is they're excessively greedy or anxiety ridden to get ahead of the check which especially in Ultimate causes their group to stall progress for hours because of how long it takes to even practice later sections of the fight unless you use the raid simulator.
Arthas quite literally says that the only thing he does is dummy rotation, he doesn't do jack shit else. Mind you he's Ninja so most fights don't require melee to do fucking anything more than anyone else. But that simplicity kind of says it all, you don't need to be a total parsing autist to clear current Ultimate.
The biggest grinds are finding a group you don't want to choke out, and being willing and able to slam through the progression treadmill. That's about it, it is hard in a way but not insurmountably difficult. It is a really complicated team building exercise in a way.
Regarding Arthas' video, I actually agree with most of his little flowchart besides how it relates to Asmongold. Asmongold was a very special case for a couple reasons.
1: Asmongold just flat gave up on doing Savage which clearly bummed him out going forward. He pretty much gave up on Savage because it was too frustrating for him to play team synchronize swimming with keyboard inputs. The people he was actually with pretty much sucked his cock and encouraged him the entire way too, but his chat and other random fucks likely got to his head. This is of course me being charitable and assuming it was the social pressure of random fucks on the internet and Asmongold realizing he sucked ass at a game so he didn't want to embarrass himself.
2: Asmongold pissed people off with his Stormblood return because he was a major react streamer by that point and would sit around for 5+ hours and spend half of those hours saying "yeah yeah yeah I'll play Final Fantasy soon." which naturally pissed off the audience who was excited for him to play a video game. Then he went on a whole "Well you see the FF community is toxic as you can see here..." while he controls the narrative to suit his needs and pretty much tells people to go fuck themselves. Frankly even if the FFXIV are obnoxious assholes to him, he was just a different kind of obnoxious asshole back.
It goes a little beyond Arthas' model because Asmongold actively made his own drama, then got confused why their was drama, then misrepresented the drama for his own needs so he could cope and react to more crap for 6 hours a day. It is his stream, but people can say your stream sucks.
Now for something related to a different bald man with some old drama I couldn't post because KF was shitting the bed. Do we have any housing mains here?
tl;dr: "Housing main" got on twitter to bitch about baldo streaming a 3rd party website to decorate his house and got really sad and upset about this. Baldo pretty much says "First world problems lol", and learns the underbelly of the weird housing community as he steadily realizes through recent drama that the random social circles in FFXIV are the epitome of first world problems.
