I made a post about this: Solution to low pop/imbalanced servers: Incentives
I enjoyed playing on a low pop server in phase 1 of TBC classic (for reasons very specific to me). The community was great, but we literally had less than 25 alliance players on the entire server. Mag and Gruul were never attempted on alliance on my server. I don’t really want to transfer to a mega server, but have been considering it as an insurance against needing to transfer again. Also friends of mine have gone to Faerlina alliance, so that’s where I’d likely take this character.
The absolutely smallest (truly dead) servers should be scheduled for deletion. The medium to small servers with life still left in them should be given some help to stay afloat. I think well thought out incentives would be a good way to do this, and would justly reward people who happen to have stuck it out on these servers.