OK, I’ll let you have that one and rephrase The superior reason why PoE2 is successful now is because of the success PoE1 has become.
PoE2 would not been peaking 500.000 concurrent players during release without the success of PoE1. In fact, without PoE1 there would be no PoE2 The fact that you as a single individual do not like PoE1 but enjoy PoE2 is pretty much irrelevant why PoE2 exploded.
I think this fact might actually be quite important, because there are a lot of such individuals (me too, so 2 individuals in total ). And the reason we love PoE 2 is because it is NOT PoE 1. Majority of PoE 1 community didn’t want changes in the gameplay, they were totally fine with simplified zoom-zoom action and hate more meaningful and challenging, more skill-based gameplay of PoE 2. I would expect, that most of them will probably return to PoE 1 and these 2 games will have quite separate playerbases.
In the other hand, it’s up to GGG to decide to keep push PoE 2 in the new direction which PoE 1 veterans don’t like or roll it back (currently, endgame is somewhere in between). Will see where they will go.
Btw, 500,000 is only on steam, there also standalone launcher, consoles, etc, so it was probably over million in total.