As someone who’s played a lot of GW2 over the past couple of years, I can confirm that it’s still fantastic. It doesn’t get anywhere near the amount of content that WoW gets, but it’s on a good cadance these days and outside of buying expansions, is absolutely playable without spending a penny.
Helium Rain launched a few years ago as a commercial game with an open source launcher (BSD-3), and as of a few weeks ago the game became free on Steam. The developer is no longer maintaining it, but there’s still a small community that are interested in it.