Is this just a gold hunt now?

Anyone else feel like PoE is turning more and more into a chase for gold?

I'm not sure what I want to do when I'm not working (ok, legitimately I'm retired but not working because I don't want to) is chase money all the time.

Can we move away from this whole situation where everything comes down to a gold grab?

Yes, that is correct.

Instead of grinding maps yourself for disappointment you can grind for gold and maps that are then fed to your kingsmarch device so that your NPC mappers can disappoint you by association.

In terms of Kingsmarch the only thing that's big money is feeding farmers to ship big shipments off for mirror shards. It costs ~350k gold per day to feed the farmers when maxed out which means if you're going to bother you should be buying a gold farm run on TFT or trade chat. You can run disenchanters to supplement these shipments with dust to get your shipment out faster.

If you don't want to do that it's safe to just ignore Kingsmarch entirely.

Path of Exile is 100% moving away from an ARPG into a cookie clicker game unironically. Kingsmarch added FOMO, and gold made getting gear upgrades way too easy in the campaign. It's been a slippery slope, but the identity of the "hardcore ARPG" from 2013 has vanished. Either they rework ruthless, or people are going to complain about how casual PoE has become. However, making PoE more casual is in GGG's best interest because more revenue.

Async trade made trading worse somehow... Glad they copied the PoE 2, but why in God's name did they do anything more than very small (like 500g) costs per item. Spend 95% of time just farming gold to try and trade for items now...

Its a nice mix right now, however I do think at times gold becomes a limiting factor to interact with players.

However, the developers never wanted it to be so trade focused, so obvious steps to curb bots, and actually encourage gameplay seems like the right call.

Regret orbs exist, stash trading exist, Kingsmarch is optional. So what do you need gold for if not just for your convenience?
Game expanded, changed but the core is still there.
If anything me personally, I would put paywall entry (like poe 2 beta) and add gold cost to any trade (or whatever you want it be that you need to obtain from playing the game) to smash scammer/bots and hideout flippers.