Yes, they claimed it wasn’t appropriate for the Shadowlands, that there was no reason to do archeology.
It was such transparent nonsense that (at least in my eyes) it has permanently damaged the credibility of their communication with us.
There have been rumblings that on a philosophical level, the devs don’t like the profession model for minigames and would prefer to keep them as self-contained one-off expansion features. This was the stated reason when asked again in more recent interviews,
At the end of BFA, fewer accounts had maxed out BFA archeology than had completed the final mythic raid of the expansion, so interest had clearly declined to a niche activity.
Around the time of BFA, they appeared to run into problems on the PTR with their attempts to adapt the existing profession to follow the new per-expansion profession model and in the end the efforts were abandoned. Other attempts to touch the code also completely broke the profession, suggesting that ongoing maintainability of the system had become an issue.
There was a sincere effort to create a new archeology-themed minigame and world event in DF. Alas, despite all the effort that seemed to have gone into it, it came out (in my eyes) a bit of a mess.
I liked archeology and I still work towards maxing out the skill on every new character. But I don’t want to over-romanticize it. There were issues and pain points. The system had fallen into a less than ideal rut with per-character pristine hunts as the endgame. The decision to do away with the +5 skill gain for completing a project in BFA was a bit brutal on alts who were maxing the skill just for the sake of maxing the skill.