Great game though, AC.
Looking at the popularity of the Soulslike games, I don't think that's true. I think what people want is a system which feels fair.
A big part of fairness is not letting randoms online destroy your stuff & progress. Stories about UO often fall into that vein. Ways in which some player made life hell for another player. Honestly doesn't sound like much fun to me. I can see why many players wouldn't want to be part of such a system.
In actual reality we are wired to seek unfair situations - we intrinsically prefer scenarios in which we have an unfair advantage. Scenarios in which the advantage is unknown or in which we even are disadvantaged are fundamentally unsettling to us because we have been programmed by billions of years of evolutionary programming to avoid those kind of scenarios! Games that present us with these kind of unfair advantages disguised as 'fair' are in fact wildly popular for exactly that reason.
But then games like EQ came out and made things easier for players, and that put pressure on UO devs to make their game easier, and eventually with time UO became a boring safe game rather than a true virtual world.