The Lich King’s power was always from his ability to raise a near infinite army. He was relatively strong on a one on one setting but that was never his major strength.
He maybe seen as a small fry, but he is one of the better villains that were created. (And if you ignore the ramblings of a malfunctioning robot with a God Complex.)
In the grand landscape of all the world’s suffering and all the evils of the infinite, the Lich King was… insignificant.-Sylvanas
Ultimately Sauron was always the big bad of the Middle Earth universe. Effectively the source of nearly all evil and he was effectively a demi god. The Lich King was never that.
The Scourge is a chunk of his power, yeah, but he’s still monstrous even by himself. DB left out a lot of his non-Scourge kit.
That still doesn’t really matter at all when comparing seperate series. It’s irrelevant who’s a bigger fish in their respective universe, what matters is what they can do.
Yeah, given that as lore has expanded we have learned that there are more powerful, god like villains then Arthas waiting to destroy us.
But before WOTLK he was a big threat with his scheme to wipe out the living and raise them for his Undead army. And we can’t be having that.
Even before Wrath, he was nothing more then a puppet of the Legion. Kil’jaeden or Archemonde could have one on one him and possibly won. Not to mention Sargeras himself.
If only Kil’Jaedan hadn’t asked Illidan to deal with the Lich King. But, we all know how busy Kil’Jaedan was.
That is the problem with being a demon lord. You can’t just burst into a world willy nilly and need a power source like say, a Sunwell to get anywhere.
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Okay, but Archimonde is capable of destroying planets. Not instantly like Sargeras can, but Archimonde can bleed the life out of an entire world. Archimonde would curb stomp the %%%% out of Sauron. You can’t even use the age/experience thing since Archimonde is older than Sauron AFAIK and has legitimately been engaged in war that entire time, unlike Sauron who has lurked in the shadows for thousands of years at a time.
Saying Archimonde could defeat Arthas doesn’t really present a meaningful cap on Arthas because Archimonde is legitimately the most powerful entity who has been our opposition in this franchise other than Argus.
In fact, Archimonde is so powerful that the Black Gate in WoD was basically a giant 
-pull. Yrel, Grommash, Khadgar, and the player characters defeating him without any sort of plan other than to just beat him to death is completely absurd and shows insane power creep in the player character to be honest. Then again, WoD was basically a joke from a lore perspective post-launch so it’s all kind of just a big mess.
You have to understand the scale of these IP are different. Middle-Earth is about a conflict in Medieval Europe inspired by Tolkien’s experiences in “The Great War”. Warcraft is a franchise that started off interplanetary, where even characters like Orc Ner’zhul could perform ritual magic that could accidentally destroy planets. Warcraft takes place in a universe that is nearer to the end of its life-span. For tens of thousands of years, world after world has been completely decimated, either life expunged or the planet literally obliterated by a big capital G style “God”.
Tolien hadn’t even seen a nuclear explosion. He imagined hell to look something like a bombarded no-mans land, not fathoming what a nuclear wasteland could actually look like. Tolkien’s nightmares are an industralized battlefield, Hell in Warcraft is irradiated worlds (Fel having an appearance not unlike what we consider a “Nuclear Glow” that causes mutations etc).