honestly I think nostalgia is a factor at this point. the game is always most fun on new worlds, but always stagnates later, fun to play world start even just for week or so. I feel like most people agree since population trend is the same each world, but development is almost purely passion project of 2 guys who dont seem to want to make a popular game anyway.
to be fair it definitely the most unique mmo on the market imo. but it will always be niche due to grind/un-intuitiveness, as well as bad graphics. my mine gripe with graphics is not how they look but that they have such bad performance, they are working on rewrite for performance but its taking years.
only new mmo on the scene with any potential imo is New World.