You can still try it and see for yourself, that's what the free trial is for.
Plenty of people find those early game enjoyable when they try it themselves and not as bad as everyone made it out to be. It's worse than later part for sure and that's why people are saying it's bad, mostly to set the expectation low. Otherwise they think people come looking for the "good stuffs" would be disappointed with with what they see and think the entire game is gonna be like this so it's their way of saying this is not the good stuff they've been going on about.
But they've been doing this too much that it got to the point that they made the early game sounds so bad that it instead keep people away from playing at all.
It's actually more like 7/10 experience that people made it seems like it's 4/10. It's not so bad that it's like throwing 50 hours of your life away. There's still plenty of fun you can have in these 50 hours.
Of course, there are people who can't stand the earlier story at all and that's understandable. It's not for everyone, but you really won't know if you don't try and see it for yourself.
I really would like to give it another go. I did use the trial about a year ago, and it wasn't so much the story that caused me to stop caring (the game had barely begun) but the combat system. It was clearly reinforcing that MMO trope that all players are dumbasses and can only cope with having one or two buttons to press for the first few hours of the game, and it would slowly hand out a new skill/ability every few hours. It was that, coupled with rigid class design and the lack of playstyle customization, that made me think the game is probably not for me.
I like games that encourage build personalization (ESO, Path of Exile, etc) and have always hated the weird mindset some MMO devs and players have that you can't possibly learn a class by having a bunch of skills all at once, and instead it's mandatory to have class skills doled out individually over the course of 50+ hours to be able to understand it.
I hear so much about Heavensward's story that I'd love the option to buy a level boost that starts me off at that expansion, with a full set of class skills to play around with, and I'd happily learn a class over the next three expansions worth of story. But without that I don't think I could endure the slow pace of skilling up with a mediocre story for dozens of hours before getting there. So I think without a specific Heavensward level boost I'm kinda resigned to accepting this is just a story I'll be missing out on. The game doesn't seem to respect player time up until that point (not unique to FF14 at all of course - that's a common MMO issue), so it is what it is.
