That was certainly the lore back when the only real people using the Emerald Dream were Druids and the Green Dragonflight, but that’s not really how players are working with it atm. Fyrakk and the Druids of the Flame essentially opened a tear, and we the players go in through a portal. We the player character aren’t sleeping our way into it, deputising anyone to have to care for our physical bodies, or anything like that - it’s now just another realm we port to wholesale. Presumably, that’s how the non-Druid Night Elves like Tyrande, the Priestesses, Huntresses, etc. are also doing it.
That’s one of the drawbacks of how they’ve essentially diluted what the Emerald Dream is, sadly.
And the part about the Emerald Dream, what it is, the Dream having layers, etc., is all stuck in a book that most players probably don’t even know exists.
I don’t think you quite understood what was said, so maybe using numbers will help with that.
Let’s assume that the Kingdom of Lordaeron had 5 million residents.
Now, the Kingdom was wiped out. We don’t have a canon source to say how many people got away. So assumption 1 that you’re making up (which I think is probably actually true, but it’s important to note that IS an assumption, and not canonically evidenced), is that the majority of these residents were in fact killed. Now, majoriy can mean a lot of things, it could be 2.5 million, it could be 4 million, it could be 4.9 million.
Next step now is that of these people who died (let’s say for now it was 4 million), all of them joined the Scourge. THat’s technically assumption #2, since we’ve seen through in-game and so on that some bodies can’t be raised, are too damaged, etc. etc. And of course, there are canon characters like Uther and the other Paladins, whatever. Let’s just roll with 4 million Lordaeron residents who are all now Scourge.
Now of course, the Scourge includes all the forces of the dead. It includes those died in Dalaran, in Quel’Thalas, even in the outskirts of Gilneas, Alterac, Stormgarde, etc. etc., At some point, from all of these, a splinter faction broke off from the Lich King’s mind control and became Forsaken. We technically do not know what the composition of this splinter faction was. Plenty of Scourge did not have the mental strength to break from the Lich King’s control. From those 4 million now-Scourge Lordaeron residents, it may be that only 1 million joined the Forsaken. Or only 20,000. Or 3 million.
And of course, in all of these steps, the numbers are being reduced by true death. Some of the Scourge forces died fighting against people like Kael, and Garithos. Even against the Dreadlords during the Frozen Throne. More of the Scourge forces probably died at the hands of invading the various kingdoms, like Quel’Thalas in the first place. So it may be that by the time the Forsaken split happened nad Underci, there were only 1 million Lordaeron residents left undead in the Scourge, ergo even fewer joining the Forsaken. And from there, Forsaken forces even died during the battles and fights that led to the claiming of Lordaeron in the first place.
Hence, depending on the assumptions you’ve made along the way, there are realistic scenarios to end up with the idea that the number of Lordaeron residents alive is far lower than you’re just assuming. If, for example, only 20,000 Lordaeron Forsaken are undead, the Forsaken make up 100,000 undead as a population, but there are 100,000 Lordaeron refugees still alive, the idea that Lordaeron’s residents “reclaimed their land” is a questionable statement. The Forsaken could be described as an occupying force denying the greater portion of Lordaeron residents the ability to claim their land. I’m not saying that’s actually the case, the lore set forward ensures that we do not know. Personally, I think that’s more interesting.
Blizzard are the ones who have established that there is no such thing as a “new Alliance”. They were the ones who explicitly set out lore such as Gilneas petitioning to “rejoin” the Alliance during the events of Cataclysm, for example. Gilneas could never rejoin a faction that it was never a part of, if we were talking about 2 distinct entities.
Huh?
The Scarlet Crusade, as well as members of the Argent Dawn, are also living residents of Lordaeron. If “claim to ownership” is a thing, people who were actually living in the Kingdom, and are still living there fighting to reclaim it, are fairly relevant. At the time WoW went live, the Scarlets weren’t “pretty much pushed back” at all, they had a base of operations in Undercity’s backyard that posed an existential threat until we the players defeat them. Brill was under direct threat, and the only thing left from there is the Undercity …
I’m going to stop here on this sidetrack, because it’s getting more and more irrelevant (and it kinda already was) to the topic, and I’m not particularly interested in having to correct points of canon.