It's not even that solid of an OST. At the time I felt like it had the weakest and least memorable music of any FF game I'd ever played up to that point - even the MIDI tracks on FF2 and FF3 (aka FFIV and FFVI) had way more character and charm. And since then tons of games have come out with much better music.
"Eyes on Me" felt like their attempt to repeat the success of "One-Winged Angel", but which failed miserably because it felt tonally jarring to the rest of the game, and was the love theme of two characters I felt apathetic about at best and actively hated at worst. All of the battle themes and incidental music felt bland compared to previous games. I can still hum tons of songs from FFI, FFIV, FFVI, and even FFX (mostly "To Zanarkand"), but if you held a gun to my head today and asked me to hum a single song from FFVIII, I'd be dead.
FFVIII's music sort of came in that murky period when composers were still getting used to the idea of being able to work with full CD-quality audio in games (as opposed to being limited to chip-tune MIDI tracks as in earlier generations), and we really didn't start getting strong soundtrack compositions until the next generation or so.