Strongholds lets you investigate new features for your Stronghold and also new items/potions to craft in the Lab crafting consumables the Workshop or send vessels and crew members on missions from the Station, assign bonuses for your Stronghold at the manor Lost Ark Gold, but you can also upgrade your alts there. Everything you do within your Stronghold consumes energy, which replenishes over time or with items.
But everything you do there also gives you Stronghold Experiment Points to level it up. The materials that you will need for your Stronghold come from gathering (logging and mining, foraging) across the globe as well as an energy system that is removed after every gathering action. Strongholds could appear as an added-on system for gameplay but it actually feeds into the gameplay core of everything you'll do.
My main worry about Lost Ark was going to be content. After playing New World, that was a legitimate fear of mine considering the amount of work to do by the end of the game. The good news is that Lost Ark has tons to accomplish at the end of the game while you strive to acquire higher equipment.
There's a list of dailies and weeklies that link to the entire contents in the game that you can do. There's plenty to choose from to choose from, so you can pick what you'd like to do... like the possibility of sailing through a myriad of islands that offer unique tasks and rewards. As you explore the islands and earn points that can be used to redeem rewards.
Other final game-related activities you can take on are World Bosses or Chaos Gates (each have a limited number of times during which you can earn rewards every day), Guardian Raids are essentially you searching for and killing massive monsters like in Monster Hunter, the Tower where you go through multiple levels of increasing difficulty within the dungeon Lost Ark Gold buy. Cube is a timed game, Boss Rush pits you against a myriad of bosses, and PvP.