I think an important thing to remember is that while gw2 does have a very friendly community overall, this doesn't negate the existence of toxic people. Particularly, toxic people who might have been your friend before their toxic behavior started. Blocking them doesn't take you off their friendlist. The fact that I cannot stop a toxic person from following me and knowing when and where I'm online, is a real problem. The only solution anet have given me to a toxic follower is to completely isolate myself and appear offline to everyone. No whispers, no guild chat. And this problem is not a wvw thing bc I generally didn't play wvw at the height of encountering this problem myself.
I literally inherited a guild bc "guild leader got a stalker and basically disappeared." And to be frank theres 101 ways to get around being blocked in game and that doesn't even touch on the fact that they can still figure out you're in game, where you are, and contact you on some other form of social media. Anet will not do anything about them harassing you on discord even though the inability to remove followers is a direct cause of that harrassment. I have watched this, over the last 9 years, happen to at least three people. Where just one sufficiently determined person made the game unplayable and blocking them actually made it so anet wouldn't do anything about them.
The game has definitely needed an update to the follower system for a long while. Even just the ability to say no when people follow without necessarily making it a mutual friends system. There's plenty of people on my current follower list that I'd just prefer if they weren't bc I dont particularly like them and not bc they annoy me to the point of blocking them. And I can't think of a single, acceptable reason why people you block can still see what map you're on. There is a divide between "who I'm willing to play games with" and "who I want to actually know where I am at all times" that the current friendlist doesn't allow me to make.