I played Vanilla, this was true on the smaller servers(in fact sometimes BG’s wouldn’t even pop for most of the day, which is why dueling outside IF was so popular).
But I also played private servers and for the bigger servers you had near-instant queues for the minority faction 24/7, and for the majority faction the highest queue times were maybe 30 minutes(some of the servers were very imbalanced, but they usually became less imbalanced over time).
Moreover, Nostalrius usually only had about 6-8k online during NA hours, and there were always tons of BG’s going(current server capacity for non-layered servers is about 6k, and layered is about 8k).
The only thing that really benefits from crossrealms is non-60 bg’s and people playing during offpeak hours.
What I originally recommended was to have “same-realm priority BG’s”. Where it would match everyone from the same realm first(like they queued as a premade), but after X minutes it would pull from the general queue(matching other servers as a group in the same way).
On the bigger/balanced servers this would effectively eliminate crossrealm BG’s because they would almost always have enough people to fill a BG. But would also guarantee people on smaller servers and badly imbalanced servers could still play.
I recommended this before BG’s were even released, and then made a couple more posts but they preferred to destroy alliance AV premades instead, while making the other BG’s 90% premades until everyone quit playing.
This was the first time I commented on it, dated December 6th, 2019.
If you want to see my other threads, just search for “Same-server priority”.