Just an anecdote, but on the ffxiv subreddit and discords I lurk around there have been a LOT of xbox players going through the free trial for the first time. Considering you can play a lot for free and the series S being somewhat cheap, I can see this being a fair boon to the game.
What you say is true but if you followed the reports you’ll know they fired the whole of the blizzard survival team, a good chunk of the Overwatch team and writers/story people from WoW. Very much not only the redundancies.
I wonder if Sony would allow gamepass in their ecosystem. That said, if this is true then we are likely to see Microsoft leave the console hardware market.