Again, since people here are really keen on assuming the worst:
What a lot of people are misreading here is that Wrath of the Lich King is slated to come out this year. It hasn’t even been a year since TBC released. What that says, to me anyways, is that Blizzard is not even close to having Dragonflight in a presentable state and only announced the game to get players feeling engaged and excited for the game again.
So what do they do? They pump out WotLK instead to keep players interested in playing through the inevitable content drought that we’re going to hit relatively soon. My bet is that WotLK will be out before the end of Summer.
We probably know nothing about Dragonflight because there isn’t anything to show right now. If you remember, the general content cycle was expansion → Classic → expansion → Classic, and its been that way since 2018. Now it’s expansion → Classic → Classic again. I don’t think that was unintentional.
Basically, don’t jump to conclusions about what the expansion has. We know nothing about it and that’s probably because the game isn’t close to being ready for public consumption.
Also, I just want to say that this game has been small for quite a bit of time. Shadowlands was really small. The only reason why you think it wasn’t is because it had systems stacked on systems to make it seem like it was a large game. Nothing about Shadowlands was large.