I had been repeating only what others had said in other topics and that server sizes were smaller. Blizzard set out to remedy the queues by increasing size.
18-22k? or did you mean 1.8-2.2k?
“Vanilla realms were purposefully capped around 2.5-3k Even now the live realms are capped to 3.5k ish.”
https://amp.reddit.com/r/classicwow/comments/8kocjt/what_was_the_population_size_of_most_vanilla/
“Believe it or not its not small, the private server scene having upwards to 10+k players online is extremely unblizz like and many servers need to edit quest mob spawns in order to cope. the vanilla world was created to have a 2.5-3k cap.”
These 10k references come from private servers.
Mark Kern even verifies this:
