I found a lot of things in this review pretty spot on, and am curious if others feel the same. I do still regularly play one MMO which I love (GW2), but dumped all the others I used to play since I got fed up with their obvious shift to practices he discusses here. While Anet may be guilty of employing some, they are not imho deliberately destroying the play experience just to sell you a workaround since in game achievement tracks are still the primary focus.
I'd still argue that it's worse than giving the customers the ability to roll out that history. When your incentive is subscription fees, then you're trying to keep people playing longer, which means making the game grindier. At that point, it's trivial to add hours and hours of content, because it takes so long to make the numbers go up.