There are a ton of systems in Battle for Azeroth that are "alt unfriendly." There's the Azerite treadmill element: needing to keep up in Azerite in order for new gear with the same bonuses but higher stats to actually be useable for your character. The Essences introduced in 8.2 were certainly more interesting than the original Azerite traits, but while they've created a kind of interesting scavenger hunt (though also forced some players to do content they weren't interested in if they want the best essences) it's also meant that you need to do a bunch of those activities you might not be so crazy about on multiple characters. I unlocked a second essence slot on my Shaman only to realize he only had the one essence, and so I quickly ran a bunch of Island Expeditions in order to get the Worldvein Resonance one just to fill in the slot.
One of the big questions Blizzard developers have tended to ask of players who want things to be more alt-friendly is why they want to skip over the resource-and-power gathering activities that, you know, are the game.
But I think that what we're dealing with is actually a kind of referred problem. It's not that the game is too hard on alts. It's that the game demands too much of mains.
And I'll add in the caveat here that your mileage may vary quite a bit. There are some players who pick a character and just stick to them. They want to invest everything in that character and just see the game from that perspective, trusting other players to enjoy being other classes, races, or what have you.
Here's the thing, though:
For much of WoW's existence, you basically had one system to increase character power, which was gear. You simply ran dungeons and raids, or sometimes crafted items, and when you got better stuff, your character got more powerful.
What that meant was that there was a certain plateau you could hit. I don't remember the exact item level it was (and since the item squishes and level scaling, it's very hard to look it up,) but in 3.3, for example, you could basically farm the ICC-affiliated dungeons for... 245 gear? And you could spend your Emblems of Frost on 251 tier pieces or 264 non-set pieces (ok, I guess I do remember.) But once you got all those pieces - all the drops you wanted from the dungeons and all the gear from the vendors - your only route to greater player power was to run the raid.
And it was a fantastic raid, mind you (it's the one I've spent the most time running in a raid group.) But, for example, on my Paladin main, I got to a point where I really only needed to break him out once a week to run that raid with the guild. The rest of the time, I could focus on my other characters. My guild even had a weekly alt-run where I took my Death Knight (who got to a similar gear-plateau.)
And frankly, it felt great. Our mains were utter beasts and our alts could get pretty powerful as well.
Now, I adore Legion - it finally unseated Wrath as my favorite expansion - but the introduction of Artifact Power did also introduce some new problems. The way things are set up, there's really no end of usefulness to more artifact power. And that means that any time you're not playing on your main, there's some power you're effectively leaving on the table.
In Legion, though, there were at least breakpoints. You could finish up your artifact's traits, and while yes, you'd eventually get to that 20-rank "you're just more powerful" rank, the diminishing returns were enough of an issue that I think only the really hardcore raiders were fixated on maxing it out.
But still, in principle, it was problematic. Legendaries in Legion were also a big issue - the pieces themselves were often quite fun, with cool effects, but the completely random nature of their acquisition was infuriating.
The point is, I think that WoW is more fun as a game when you can look at your character and say "ok, good enough." Certainly, if you're a mythic raider that point will come later than it will for other players, but there's nothing that will make a player feel more comfortable working on an alt than letting them feel they're not neglecting their main by doing so.
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