I’ll take the bait on this one - convince me to play WoW rather than FF14 with a talk about WoW’s strengths and FF14’s weaknesses.
Classic/TBC Classic sure.
FF14 is a series of 500 compulsary fetch quests with cut scenes. 100 of them are amazing story moments, 100 of them have solo battles and 100 of them unlock dungeons and raids. That leaves you with 200 of them being boring filler which unfortunately are mostly front loaded in the base game or the start of each expansion. This does not mesh well with the MMO genre as you have to do single player content to unlock multiplayer content.
WoW had (talking Classic here until the end of WotLK) a very light optional story which was mostly world building, hyping up future content without bogging you down in storytelling. It's very suitable for a MMO as players discuss the hints they found in quests and can group to run through ALL of the content faster.
WoW continues with this world building by having sprawling dungeons and raids to explore whereas FF14 is more of a theme park ride in it's dungeons and raids - though what they have is just different and of similar quality actually.
WoW had much better PvP and customisation systems.
This is why I hardly played FF14 and played way more WoW up to and including Stormblood and the Classic re-release.
With retail WoW the issue is that the FF14 compulsary storytelling method paid off BIG in Shadowbringers and Endwalker (including redeeming previously annoying characters) while WoW now has a broken incoherent story for new and old players alike.
WoW has also been drowned by boring time wasting compulsary "customisation" systems while FF14 kept it simple and you can just jump in and do the incredible raids straight away or level an alt without losing progress.
FF14 also has tons of optional content and everything from previous expansions is playable with meaningful difficulty and rewards.
I actually can't make an argument in favour of retail WoW without talking about the strengths of Classic (upto the end of WotLK) and how WoW doesn't do that stuff anymore.