The irony of your WoW example is that "retail" WoW basically evolved by Blizzard adding features in response to player feedback where each step when viewed individually seemed reasonable.

And eventually the situation got so "bad" that players realized they actually didn't want any of this (a lot of people have lengthy commentaries on how more in-game friction somehow makes the game better), and then the demand for Classic actually became overwhelming. And even so, I'm not sure Classic consistently has more players than Retail. Probably just two different player bases.

Does it matter if classic doesn't have as many or more players than retail? Nobody said it would. Just that some players would prefer to play classic and that has certainly held up.