You don't need to imagine what would happen. Path of Exile was designed by hardcore Diablo 2 fans. If you really don't like content past the main story it does

You don't need to imagine what would happen. Path of Exile was designed by hardcore Diablo 2 fans. If you really don't like content past the main story it does still have a great regular first playthrough campaign. It even replaces the Diablo 2 "play through the same 5 acts 3 times on increasingly higher difficulties" thing with a single 10 act long campaign, although the second half is revisiting altered versions of the same areas from the first half with different plot. But they also weave a bunch of cool lore into the postgame in a way that Diablo 2 didn't really do[0], and make it much more interesting than just killing the same handful of endgame bosses over and over again for loot. [0] At one point the main postgame big bads were canonically characters that used to be the good guys in there fighting the old bad guys, but got driven insane in what was basically a giant meta reference to hardcore players that spend thousands of hours in the postgame.