I played just about every arpg's out there (torchlight, grim dawn, last epoch, d1-d4, Poe 1, etc.).
Here's my take as to what is going on in Reddit.
GGG has always had a target audience: hardcore, dedicated, committed players (the passive skill tree is massive).
This is a problem. The majority of the million players that bought this game is NOT their intended target audience.
Thus, there's a dissonance between the general hoi polloi and the target audience that GGG had (although they capitulated a bit to cater towards the mass).
Obviously, this is going to cause problems. This is actually what set Diablo 4 into a direction that went down to road of simplifying and making it catered towards casual players (Going to lvl 100 used to take forever in Season 1 and NOBODY had uber uniques).
If GGG wants to change their target audience (which I think they will for the $), I think they might go in NOT NECESSARILY a wrong direction, but a different TARGET direction of the audience. I think most POE players in general won't want this, but newer players will.
Hence, there will ALWAYS be this kind of tension you see on Reddit. However, I do think they can seriously do something about the backtracking of the huge maps. It becomes irritating and feels like a waste of time.
TLDR: If you enjoy it, great. If you don't, play another game--but don't try to change the core philosophy of what made GGG great. There are still some problems but will get smooted out since it's still early access.