It's an online multiplayer PvP game. There is no pacing, conclusion or completeness like a single-player "estimated 40 hour playthrough" game, discovery is a metagame, and a review veering into historiography can add relevant and useful information for prospective players because of it, not in spite of it.
Online PvP games absolutely have pacing. Back then it was just about the skill ceiling and learning curve. In today's gaming era it's also matchmaking ranks and rewards and battlepass content. I do miss the days when you could buy a big budget multiplayer game and always jump in with all the tools pro players had. But it sounds like he had several complaints with the game dumbing down the skill ceiling (e.g. sniper bunny hopping) and bugs that let a novice player wipe the enemy team. A well paced multiplayer game has techniques that seem feasible to master but require a good amount of practice. A bad one only lets the top 1% of players achieve those skills after thousands of hours, or doesn't have such techniques at all.
Online RPG often have ceilings so high non hardcore players could play for years without actually experiencing all content especially with the infinite side-track available via socialization and helping others complete content.
You say “back then” but there was a solid 15 years or so where skill based matchmaking didn’t exist, so whether or not you hit a skill ceiling varied from match to match and even from player to player you faced within a match.
I remember playing unreal tournament, counterstrike, etc. It’s not like servers were honest about skill level even 20% of the time lol