It makes sense if you´ve been reading the same, somewhat repetitive story for years. It´s not the end of the world, but it´s ultimately going to be a bit embarrassing in the future, the fact that Oda has already kept his story going on over a decade after his peers finished their own, extremely long running shonen battle manga(Kishi, Kubo), and there´s probably about 5-10 years left, meaning Oda is probably going to outlist another gen of shonen manga. This is def going to deter more people from reading OP in the future, decades later and so on.
Look at Dragon Ball for example, it´s so popular so many years later, because it only ran for 11 years, and in some countries people didn´t even really watch the first half. It´s not as hard to get into as OP is.