One person I know that has played WoW started later and doesn’t really see any appeal in Classic. (Then again, they quit in Legion and didn’t come back for BfA, because they don’t like playing solo and the other people they played with moved on.)
Another person I know hasn’t played WOW since Cata/MoP, but their reasons for quitting were less about WOW and more about quitting gaming completely, so they’re not coming back.
One brother’s wife wants to play again, and was talking about getting him into it, even got him to play Legion with her for a few months, but he has issues with game addiction and any access to Retail leads to an obsessive need to log in (to the point they were on a cross-Atlantic cruise and he was acting like someone going through withdrawals because there was no wifi for a while.)
So, no, any WOW friends I’ll have in Classic will be ones I make along the way.